Lucy Shiekh has been involved in Global Generation for over five years, first as a Generator (youth social activist), then as a Voices of the Earth Fellow. Her latest role as a community action researcher has been made possible thanks to a pioneering partnership with Dr Jane Myat and her colleagues involved in ‘The Listening Space’ an organic garden and associated activities, that sit in and around The Caversham Group Practice in Kentish Town. Financial support for Global Generation’s Action Research involvement with the Listening Space, came from UCL Partners. This is what Lucy has to say about her experience.

For many years now, I have said that Global Generation has thrived in the slipstream of other people’s waste. Thanks to forward thinking property developers like British Land and Argent, we have been able to locate our community projects inside and adjacent to large scale construction projects. Inhabiting spaces that are usually out of bounds for community groups, means we are well placed to establish a circular culture which many in the construction world refer to as a circular economy.

Much of what I have brought to Global Generation’s work in London has roots in the group of islands 18,300 km across the seas that form Aotearoa New Zealand; the land where I was born. The Covid pandemic meant that what might have been a brief trip for me and my husband, Rod Sugden, to visit my 95-year-old mother turned into a five-month stay.

It’s early evening and I am sitting by the door in the Story Garden classroom as I listen to the words; “feel your feet on the ground, feel your breath, find a way to sit very still.” I feel my heart pounding and I focus on the words, my body, the feeling in the room. As the simple and gentle instructions keep coming, the room drops into a shared space of silence and I relax.

“To re-inhabit the places in which we live is not to raze the smokestacks and freeways that we might find there but to fit them back into the larger unfolding of land and cosmos.”

— Freya Mathews

Much of what I have brought to Global Generation’s work has roots in the group of islands 18,300 km across the seas from London that form Aotearoa New Zealand; the land where I was born. The covid pandemic meant that what might have been a brief trip for me and my husband, Rod Sugden, to visit my 95-year-old mother turned into a five-month stay.

Sitting in a circle, with a group of teenagers choosing values that mean something to them, could easily be what you might find in one of Global Generation’s London gardens. This time, Rod and I were having a parallel but different experience.

I am sitting here overlooking a huge bush-clad gulley north of Auckland in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Ahead of me is a thick green mantle of forest giants; rimu, kahikatea, tanekaha and three huge kauri that tower above the other trees. In hot weather kererū, the native wood pigeons, swoop through the forest in their mating dance, and tui sing their trickster tale songs.