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Director Charlie McConnell talks about his first months at the college
May marks my first six months at Dartington. I joined the Trust following five years as CEO of the Carnegie UK Trust, where amongst other initiatives we launched the influential Carnegie Commission for Rural Communities and the Carnegie Commission on the future of Civil Society. We held the launch conference for the Carnegie Rural Commission at Dartington in 2004, in recognition of its long history as a centre for innovation and experimentation in farming and rural development.
I’d known of Dartington’s wider work on democratic education since the early seventies when I was a community educator and as editor of a magazine called Scottish Radical Education. Dartington School, A.S. Neil, Paulo Freire and others inspired my commitment to a development education approach of reaching out to and empowering people whom the ‘system’ had failed, in my case working on poor council estates in the north and later internationally. My subsequent career in Higher Education, working for UK and international non-governmental organizations, with grant making foundations and as an adviser to the UK and Scottish Governments owes much to that earlier Dartington influence.
The opportunity to move to Dartington to lead the Trust’s work on sustainability and to run the internationally respected Schumacher College was a challenge I’ve relished. Very few trusts in the UK fund or support work around sustainability and even less around the challenge of climate change. Through Carnegie, the UK Association of Charitable Foundations and the European Foundations Centre I had been active in advocating for more investment by independent trusts in this area. Dartington was one of those few trusts. Indeed for 18 years it has been at the cutting edge of supporting educational work in this area, through Schumacher College. More recently trustees have recognized the need to enhance Schumacher College’s work by encouraging it to move beyond the walls, to envisage the estate once more as a radical living classroom, where all of our assets, money, people, buildings and land are harnessed for education, demonstration and thought leadership. Where we walk the talk.
Since joining Dartington much of my work has focused upon bringing together a wider team at what we will soon be calling Dartington Schumacher College, acknowledging the radical and respected reputations of the Trust, but also of EF Schumacher, the author of Small is Beautiful. As said, the college already has a high reputation since it was established 18 years ago as the UK’s first international ‘green’ college. This month, as we come of age, we ran a ‘futures’ think tank of invited staff and critical friends to inform our work against the backcloth of the local and global challenge of climate change, recession and peak oil. We’ve recently added three staff to the team and are about to appoint three more, creating the largest college complement in our history. Sustainability at Dartington is now at the centre of the Trust’s work.
Building upon our world class reputation in such fields as holistic science, ecology, food and education for sustainability, we will be extending our developing profile around new economics, social enterprise, sustainable community development, civil society organizing, social justice and the arts. The latter two also accessing into the Dartington Trust’s other two areas of in house professional expertise. This also reflects my own discipline as a political scientist and community development educator and my keenness to ensure that Dartington Schumacher College is genuinely holistic and interdisciplinary in its approach.
The other priority I’ve set is to ensure that we are better at reaching out, as well as inviting more people to come to share the residential/retreat experience at the college (not least because of the carbon footprint which international travel entails). We have plans to develop an E learning facility on the web, of working more collaboratively across the UK and internationally with key players in central and local governments, with civil society activists and those in business world. And locally we are working ever more closely with the Transition Towns movement and through outreach education and demonstration work.
Schumacher College is part of the Dartington Hall Trust, a company limited by guarantee, registered in England and as a charity (company no. 1485560, charity no. 279756). Registered office: The Elmhirst Centre, Dartington Hall, Totnes, Devon TQ9 6EL, UK.