We are a collective of young activists and researchers.
Before the pandemic, we were full-on organising the www.ukdegrowthsummerschool.org, a week-long school (initially planned for August 2020) aimed at letting the political strategies and imaginaries of activists, students, and practitioners be enriched by degrowth, as a framework that is able to intersect multiple struggles towards an ecological just transformation.

With the outbreak of Covid-19, we decided to postpone the physical summer school to 2021. However, we understood that, during the pandemic, spreading the degrowth message of life versus capitalism and health versus growth is an even more pressing task. Therefore, we decided to bring some of the topics we planned to discuss during the summer school online, through the project of #DegrowthTalks.

The project consisted of 11 online discussions live-streamed on YouTube, where world-leading experts debated degrowth in relation to topics such as health, feminism, decolonisation, the state, biodiversity, art, urban planning, politics for the pluriverse, the Green New Deal, monetary systems and business, as well as a session in Spanish on thinking degrowth from Latin America. The livestreams enjoyed high levels of attendance and participation, with more than 300 people simultaneously watching some of the debates, participating and asking questions through the chat. In total, the videos reached more than 13,500 views.

We aim at continuing our project of popular education and effective communication of degrowth ideas. So far, degrowth knowledge has been too constrained within academia and activist circles. We want to popularise it beyond them, getting to broader audiences. We believe this is a fundamental, pressing task for realising the kind of societies we aspire to, societies that enable a good life for all within planetary boundaries.

Present and medium-term future projects include:
– A debate between the authors of the many degrowth books published in 2020.
– Many Degrowth short (1min) videos that can be easily shared and circulated in social networks, where key ideas are expressed in an accessible, fun, way.
– A Degrowth animated short movie. Degrowth needs to speak multiple languages to get beyond the barriers that has so far contrained it, and animation is one of them.
…others to come.

However, we are a collective that works on a voluntary basis (despite putting many many energies and hours into this project) and we are incurring in fundamental expenses to keep running our activities: livestream services, web services, animations, video editing, and so on. We are also looking for funding elsewhere, but especially in these troubled times, finding funds for our projects is an increasingly difficult task. There is not better way to keep funding our activities by being helped by many small donations of our supportive comrades. To make degrowth hegemonic, we need the people-power of each one of us! Please help how you can 🙂

Ps: even 3€ donations are fine! If 500 supporters donate 3€, we’ll get to our target!