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WDM Scotland organise a great annual gathering for activists and campaigners. This year’s is in Stirling, very easy to get to from Edinburgh so there should be a strong showing from the E+L group.

Brief details below and a link to the event page for booking information. Oh yes, and it’s free but please book!

Saturday 7 September, Stirling

Get stuck in to the detail of WDM’s food campaign, meet others campaigning locally in Scotland and share your ideas and enthusiasm for campaigning for global justice.

When:        Saturday 7 September, 12 – 4.45 (registration and coffee from 11.30)
Where:      Stirling Methodist Church, Queen St, Stirling FK8 1HL

MORE INFO and BOOKING

Last month WDM Edinburgh and Lothian members celebrated our Christmas dinner. In January?! Yup, everyone is so busy in the lead up to Christmas that we have our January meeting in a restaurant, and following last year’s form this was the tasty Cafe India!

This is a quick blog before out first proper meeting of 2013 on 11th February, as normal at 7pm in Quaker Meeting House. No talks planned this week but following the food theme we are planning for our Farmers’ Market stall later in the month, looking at how we can support WDM campaigns in 2013 and having a discussion on the new IF campaign by a broad coalition of UK aid agencies.

The inside story on international climate negotiations!  What happens at global meetings on climate and sustainability?  Do they produce results? What role do NGOs play?  What’s it like to be there?

Marcus Gustafsson (Y-Climate Action, YMCA-YWCA of Sweden, World Alliance of YMCAs) will be speaking at our December meeting (10th Dec). Marcus was an accredited delegate at the recent Rio+20 summit and Doha Climate Change Conference. He will be at WDM’s next meeting to discuss our questions on these global meetings.

Marcus’ bio is here: http://scenetwork.co.uk/research-assistants

(P.S. if this sounds familiar this event was planned for October but had to be cancelled at the last minute.)

Event details
Monday 10th December 2012
Quaker Meeting House, Victoria Terrace, Edinburgh EH1 2JL – directions
Marcus’ talk and discussion 8-9pm
(come at 7pm to be part of the normal WDM campaign planning)
Free, everyone welcome, no need to book

Marcus Gustafsson (Y-Climate Action, YMCA-YWCA of Sweden, World Alliance of YMCAs) will be speaking at our October meeting (8th Oct), everyone is welcome to come!

Marcus was an accredited delegate at the Rio+20 summit and so can give us the inside track on what went on and some insight into what the summit outcomes mean. Hopefully it will inform our future campaigning and pressure on UK govt. Marcus’ bio is here: http://scenetwork.co.uk/research-assistants (Info reposted from last month)

In other news, two members of the group travelled to Inverkeithing to meet with Catherine Stihler MEP, a substitute member of the European committee voting this week on food speculation. She is supportive of WDM and tweeted about the meeting here. Fingers’ crossed for this important vote we’ve been campaigning on for over a year.

Finally few shoutouts about interesting Edinburgh events you can get involved with:

• Take One Action Film festival 21 Sept to 6 October
• Edinburgh World Justice Festival 6 – 17 October
• Stop Climate Chaos Scotland are planning a mass lobby of the Scottish Parliament on Oct 25
• Fairtrade Foundation in the Big Fair Bake, between 24 Sept and 4 Oct

Marcus Gustafsson (Y-Climate Action, YMCA-YWCA of Sweden, World Alliance of YMCAs) will be speaking at our October meeting (8th Oct).

He was an accredited delegate at the Rio+20 summit and so can give us the inside track on what went on and some insight into what the summit outcomes mean. Hopefully it will inform our future campaigning and pressure on UK govt. Marcus’ bio is here: http://scenetwork.co.uk/research-assistants

Our Lady Luck stall at the farmer’s market was very successful, we got rid of all our action cards. A special thank you to Lord Luck, (Vivek) and Lady Luck (Saskia). The money scarf and sunglasses certainly attracted people!

Our next stall on food speculation is on Saturday 11th August at the One World Shop , underneath St. John’s Church, West end of Princes Street which is where the craft fair is held during festival fringe time.

On 29th July we’re planning to hold a stall at the Edinburgh Farmers’ Market. Lady Luck will be there enticing people to place a bet in the casino of food speculation to see if they will win and eat well, or loose and go hungry that day. Fears are however that the fat cat bankers might be there to play and rig the odds in their favour!

The stall will raise awareness of WDM’s food speculation campaign and ask market shoppers to sign postcards to George Osborne calling for regulation to stop big banks playing casino-style games with the price of basic food which pushes up prices and leaves poor families going hungry. We’re looking for volunteers to help on the day, please get in touch if you can spare an hour.

We had planned our July meeting to include a discussion on Rio+20 but our planned speaker is out of the country for the summer, we hope to re-arrange for September or October. Instead we watched the 30min documentary ‘Seeds of Freedom’ available to stream or download from http://seedsoffreedom.info.