A summary of what we'd been up to over the past few months.

Made seedbombs and did feral food guided walks with groups of "young adults who are at risk of exclusion". We set up in front of an old manor house in the middle of a park in Aston for 4 days

Our mate Kaye from the Travellers School Charity came down also to do workshops on renewable energies and wild herbal medicine. We and the yoof made an alternative tourist guide to their areas by going out with digi cameras and taking pics of all the groovy places they hang out...

...and got em talking about the good and bad things about their areas. This included us doing an interview with a local taxi firm, conducted from the street.

Then back at the caravan we storyboarded the tourist guide and made it on the computers using The Gimp and Scribus on Linux OS:

...and ended up with a finished 8 page booklet : http://www.bravenewbrum.org/fins/touristguide_aston/finished.pdf (This PDF displays fine on some computer but not on others, haven't worked out why yet...)

After doing the booklet we made some lovely chalk stencils:

...and to finish the day we went and launched the seedbombs that we made earlier...

which was nice:

We also had a exibition of some other stencils our friend curated:

Some of the kids were very young, which we weren't expecting, but i think they enjoyed it:

Other highlights included making an alternate reality out of cardboard boxes at Artsfest in Brummie city centre with guest artist Lottie Child. She started by asking kids what they'd like to see in their ideal city so obviously things like space stations and hoverports were quickly constructed. Watching parents nodded approvingly and before you know it they were in the thick of it constructing ice cream shops and skate parks.

We also used the amazing velcro mapping machine to do alternate urban planning. It seems people are generally bored of the commercialisation of public space, and desire something a little bit more community orientated. Not necessarily *instead* of what we've got at the moment, but alongside.

And then we crushed it all up.

As well as that we did a one day mobile radio station in Kings Norton. The mystic chappie Harry Palmer interviewed many local people resulting in a CDs worth of audio material which will be available soon.

Over in Stockland Green we made postcards using the computers in the caravan and printed them there and then.We took photos of people: and then combined them with text about their wonders and blunders of their area

After the initial day we did in Kings Norton we went back over and spent a while working with community groups and skaters. Highlights of this included a medicinal food walk in the wilds of Walkers Heath, foraging for ingredients that would be of use to the Aromatherapy group, hearing of the 50 strong womens group that used to be based in the 3 Estates that helped look after the communities kids, hearing complaints about the progress for the regeneration plan, mainly to do with facilties for young people, lack of action over drugs misuse, and the extremely poor state of housing.

We combined this information with our own archival research of the very ancient politics of Kings Norton, mainly concerning school masters acting oppressively and the burning of herbalists, and with our other thoughts about the planning process for the regeneration plan and came up with "Find Your Own Way Around - A treasure hunt with a twist".

This took place on Saturday 15th October by Greaves Hall in the 3 Estates with teams completing over 30 questions and challenges which took them all over the place using a map of the hidden. People in the area performed magnificently with many families taking part and completing the challenge within the 5 hour time slot!

Bounty included local fruit and veg, solar/wind up radios, rechargable batteries and some biodiesel. It was a wonderful end to our time in Kings Norton and the results are due to be collated into a book to be displayed in the area

In between all of the above we organised a day based around a critical look at the politics of energy and resources and what collectives can do in response to the impending oil peak. We had workshops on revolutions of everyday life like DRYSTORE, involving urban adventures underneath spaghetti junction and down into the brummie tunnels to install a cache of goodies for future travellers. Kayle Brandon and Heath Bunting came down to do workshops on this.

James Wallbank from Redundant technology Inititative visited to talk about how a nationwide network of Low tech Media labs could help reinvigorate social infrastructures and help people gain new skills see -Grow Your Own Media Lab for more info.

For the rest of the weekends events we were mindF**ED by Paul Mobbs who has spent 3 years researching the future of our energy supplies and has a lot to say. Get the book Energy Beyond Oil, its very good. We also screened The End of Suburbia, a dark film about oil and society.

Our final event was over in Nechells, where John the Text Collector entertained everyone with creative street consultation, making poems and storys up out of peoples suggestions.

Our final final event will be to install the other DRYSTORE we have somewhere in the rooftops of Birmingham when Dizzy gets in touch.