Sowing Stories

By Leanne Thompson

On Saturday, March 3, Big Fag Press hosted Sowing Stories, a workshop in social media strategies for ethically engaged creatives by Kirsten Bradley of Milkwood Permaculture fame. The event sold out straight away and on the day an interesting bunch of people walked through the door. Along with KSCA members Alex, Laura, Lucas and Kim, were a couple of dozen participants, some from groups or businesses including NAVA, Frontyard, Lush and Feather and Bone. The common thread was a desire to build the social potential in communities and share actions that hinged on care, generosity and enthusiasm. Kirsten describes this energy as a wonderful sharing of ethical lives to invigorate connections.

Kirsten’s discussion was far ranging in all things that constituted online communication; from platforms, mission statements, time management, livelihoods and advocacy to technical details, big data, and conflict negotiation. There was a robust conversation about the knowledge present in the room regarding social media and Kirsten offered an enlightening glimpse into Milkwood’s remarkable achievement transforming from a farm into a ‘state of mind’ that is able to tap into an invisible but like-minded community.
Kirsten honed the morning’s dialogue down to some great insights and skills we could take away.
Words to savour are the linchpin for crafting a compelling blog which she holds central to any online communication. A website blog can act as a long term archive and also the hub from which you can schedule frequent updates and feeds to other platforms such as Facebook, twitter and u-tube creating an efficient use of time and energy. Creating clear, effective and delicious content is also the cornerstone of newsletters that offer a direct link to your community’s email inbox.

Beautiful visuals encourage your audience through the gate. Using the skills of a designer to create a great looking website and autonomous information/advertising panels will be enticing and really help easy navigation around your content and archive. A well framed image can boost text and is the key to great Instagram posts and Kirsten advised it was worthwhile to build up your photographic skills and always take lots of images while things are happening, it’s great for quick instant feeds and as a reminder and resource to draw on later.
Honest voices are inviting and real. Kirsten acknowledged that there are a few tensions present in negotiating the online terrain. Telling the story as a project unfolds will often straddle boundaries; between personal and professional, community and commercial and agreement and discord and she had some great insights about each.

Determining the voice to use before you begin will clarify parameters around personal narrative and objectivity from a project perspective. Is that thing you consider a fascinating intricacy to be explored in detail really that interesting to others or have you disappeared down the rabbit burrow?
Sharing the highs and lows along a project’s journey recognises that knowledge isn’t settled and processes can be open to experimentation and discussion. Kirsten spoke of authentic storytelling with little pretence, creating a flow in the journey that is engaging and avoids getting caught up in those eureka moments of success which lead to an definitive ‘this is how you do it’ attitude. This approach allows the story to zoom in and out between specific detail and general ideas.

A great strategy to get people talking can be to ask a really good question. If the question is well formed it can build a discussion that informs both your project and audience and means that you’re solving problems together. A good tip was to trial ideas and content on some trusted friends to test the water on potential responses before posting it online!
Milkwood’s activities also need to support Kirsten’s family and the crew involved. Her approach to an ethical and sustaining livelihood is to be upfront about their marketing and advertising. She promotes those activities as the deeper and hands-on engagements that lead on from the freely offered education, insight and advocacy.

Kirsten’s easy and approachable character infuses Milkwood’s online presence. It is understandable that she also transfers this approach to negotiating conflict when it pops up in a comment or conversation. She calls this a ‘non-defending’ style and said her aim was to model best practice as it was incredibly influential to the wider network. Her hint is to stay on your own page (don’t take the battle to other people’s pages where you don’t have control), be cool and look for something positive in the comment as an entry point to respond. Pushback can be positive, it shows that a raw nerve has been exposed and that tension can be useful to question if a concept is understood or to widen the discussion to consider different perspectives. Rather than unravelling, common threads and values are woven together through Kirsten’s considered negotiations and this in turn consolidates the Milkwood community.

The workshop was packed with information and strategies relevant to the community initiatives and ethical businesses present, fostering skills and a connective network for their projects. Big Fag Press was a great venue and Marnie’s morning tea both beautiful and delicious. Kirsten clearly pointed to the social potential of storytelling. Create a package that unfolds: if you can tempt others to look here with an intriguing tale, a chunk of research can be uncovered in the documentation of an activity, great photos make it visible, people are drawn into conversation and by having a go themselves, a bigger picture of alternatives comes into view, and then you have seeded a real community and growing resource.

Notes from a comms meeting

By Alex Wisser

The propitious beginning to “An Artist, A Farmer and A Scientist walked into a bar” was a communications strategy meeting at Big Fag Press. Sexy. I am quite happy that this humble beginning wouldn’t sustain being called cutting edge, advanced practice, avant guard or any other arts-specific descriptors within the fading paradigms of high culture. I much prefer the appropriated dag of business speak, forged in the honest hearts of self-described ‘entrepreneurs’ and applied without irony to a realm of value they have never suspected exists.

The meeting was more than just a fuck you to the status quo, but actually represents the priority that communication will take in this project. This results from several considerations. The first is that most of the activity we will be engaged in will take place in a paddock somewhere, making it difficult to reach audiences and communicate our message more broadly. The second is that the project itself has developed in part as a means of addressing the sense of isolation, and perceived exclusion from the social and political dialogues around land use and care experienced by our farmer-partners. Their lives are lived in intimate and daily engagement with both the care for and use of land. Their work to change the culture and methods of modern farming is compelled by the material dependence of their livelihood and shaped by a direct experience of both the positive and negative consequences of the farming methods applied to it. It seems to me that the perspective of these farmers should be central to the national discussion we have about our relationship to land, and yet they feel themselves excluded.

A further reason we are placing our communications strategy at the heart of the project is the sense of isolation that innovative and regenerative farmers feel in relationship to their own community. Laura Fisher and Imogen Semmler reported on their conversations with farmers about the social consequences of their choice to pursue alternative farming methods. This experience is perhaps best encapsulated by the fact that as soon as a farmer ceases to rely on the products of the agrochemical industry, they no longer have much excuse to visit the local Ag shop. They thus lose an important social connection to this hub of the farming community in which they live, but also it means that they have detached themselves somewhat from the economy that sustains the local community. Conventional farmers tend to feel that what a regenerative farmer is doing isn’t just different from the traditional mode but is directly threatening to it. This leads often to a very understandable sense of ostracism. It has been our experience though that regenerative farming is a growing movement though its advocates are often isolated geographically. One of the many aspirations of AFS is to provide an opportunity to consolidate the disparate elements of this emergent movement into a community of support with the potential to build into something substantial and sustained.

The first part of our morning was spent discussing the “why”, before our guide, Kirsten Bradley deftly guided the discussion around to the “what” and “how” of our communication strategy. The what of “An Artist, a Farmer and a Scientist walk into a bar” emerged as a many legged insect, with eight independent projects all flailing about on their own. How we pull these disparate limbs into a single body walking in a particular direction and munching on a particular leaf of grass was going to be the challenge. Through discussion, we decided that we would allow the eight stories to unfold on their own, and from these threads we would pull together a core narrative about the moment of history we are attempting to participate in. This point of cultural change in which farmers and fellow travellers have begun to drift away from established ways of seeing, thinking about, and working in relationship to land. This story will include the perspectives of scientists grappling with shifting paradigms and the struggle to change and resist change which is, no matter how frustrating, the process by which science advances. It will also include the story of some very well-meaning artists who thought they could help. Personally, I can’t wait to see what happens next!