Time to celebrate!

October is our six-month anniversary as your Pips!

As well as marking our half birthday, it's a chance to catch a breath after the huge successes of the Tooting Twirl pop-up village green, our 10th annual Foodival sustainable food festival and countless other brilliant events this year.

October's meeting is about celebrating, checking in and changing things up

We have a working list of items to discuss and make decisions on but there will also be the chance to relax after the formal stuff, with some making activities, drinks and chat.

TTT is an exciting group with limitless potential and we want you to play a part in our future plans, so come along to our open meeting and find out how you can get involved.

Tuesday 10th October

7:30pm

The Wine Room

The Trafalgar Arms

148-156 Tooting High Street, SW17 0RT

We really hope to see you on the 10th!

Jeni (co-chair), Sharon (co-chair) and Eleanor (secretary)

'The future is dappled in the present': green sky thinking now

This post is a round-up of eight imaginative projects and developments that are happening now, in Tooting and beyond. 
It's a selection of what we've spotted in the past month.

My title comes from Paul Allen of Zero Carbon Britain at the Centre for Alternative Technology, one of the contributors to Playing for Time (see below). Paul's natural-world image means that the opportunities for making a sustainable future are all around us...if we look.

We hope there is something here to catch your interest and inspire on the Bank Holiday. 
(Plus, in three posts from last week: there's our plastic bottle greenhouse to build in the garden 1200-1600 this Thursday and Friday, and then Restart and the first Tooting Field Day later in April.)

1  Playing for Time
Lucy Neal, who founded TTT in 2008, has been spending the past two years writing Playing for Time, her book about making art as if the world mattered.
Playing for Time joins the dots between key drivers of change in energy, finance, climate change, food and community resilience – and offers ‘recipes for action’ for readers to try.

It's a wonderful collection of how artists round the globe are at the same time imagining the future and working in the real world on what matters to us all.  

The book is not only for artists, and one of the points of the book is to encourage us to look out and across our silos of specialism. 
Dip into the 400 pages...you'll be hooked!

It's Lucy's book, and it's also a collaboration with sixty other contributors...so it's a great representation of the spirit of joint action, connecting with others and local solutions that we can share as 'Transition' values. And yes, there is quite a lot about Tooting in the book!

Playing for Time was published last week, and TTT blog readers can order the book from the publishers now, and get £5.00 off the price.
To order, enter this discount code: ONPFT2015 at Oberon Books.
Offer valid until 31 Dec 2015...but no need to wait until then.

2  Energy from the kinetic force of footsteps (or footballers) 
“My idea was a floor tile that would convert the kinetic energy from a footstep into electricity" says engineer Robert Kemball-Cook about his invention that provides off-grid power anywhere. It's expensive now - but "We are establishing a whole industry that never existed before.”  
Read about Pavegen here

#TootingFuture Great Conversations

A successful Electing the Future event was held tonight at the USSR club. Loads of interesting discussion about Tooting past, present and future with local voices including some of the parliamentary candidates standing in Tooting.  Thanks to Dan Watkins, Phil Ling & Esther Obiri-Darko for attending and Fleur Anderson for standing in for an absent Sadiq Khan.

Esther, Fleur, Dan & Phil with Lucy on the mic

What a lot of great ideas around improving community, green spaces, better streets, controlling traffic & pollution, access to housing and independent retail environments to name but a few. Could we imagine Balham Boulevard or taking control of the Tooting Common Cafe or even just "More Green Beauty" in Tooting and around?

A full write up will appear on the blog in due course. A #Tootingfuture is just that bit more easy to imagine.