The Green and Away Annual Cycle

In these short, dark days of winter with skeleton trees, dead vegetation, snow and mud, the lush green of our site in summer seems a distant memory.  One of our aims is to connect people more closely with nature by living with it and in it during conferences.  By building Green and Away out of canvas in a field, it is a part of nature and like nature, G and A has a yearly life cycle with the seasons.  Now it is in hibernation, with all the equipment dormant but safely stored for the winter and the field can recover unimpeded.  However, this quiet time is also important for planning, preparing and looking ahead to next year.

The first event of 2012 will be our Winter Weekend Gathering for our volunteers in February (the midpoint of our year) where we can all reconnect, reminisce and look forward to the summer season. The Spring is the time for organizing the summer with our Spring Trustees meeting, appointing the next crop of interns and doing essential maintenance on our kit.  In summer Green and Away blossoms into being as a fully formed conference centre, we renew old friendships with volunteers and welcome organizers and delegates followed by the end of season packing up.  During the Autumn we review the year and the Trustees meet for the Annual General Meeting. This cycle has flowed through the years, with Green and Away being reborn each year in a slightly different, and we hope, improved form.

We look forward to 2012 as yet another opportunity to meet amazing people, give others wonderful experiences connecting with nature, and further our aims of reducing the detrimental aspects of people on this beautiful earth.

With best wishes for a wonderful 2012                

– the G and A team

Happy Christmas from the team at Green and Away

During the summer season we meet many fantastic people, some are volunteers, some are delegates and some are speakers at the conferences. They are inspiring us by pioneering a more sustainable way to live or setting up eco businesses or writing books and giving lectures about a better way to live.  They teach us a great deal about sustainability and about how amazing people can be and meeting them is one of the joys of being involved with Green and Away.  However, not only do we gain a lot from them, so too do they gain from their time with us.  Here are some of the wonderful things people have said about us:

 Thank you once again for another fantastic weekend at Green and Away. The

feedback was all really positive – not one negative comment. Amazing – must

be getting pretty good at this after 21 years!

 I was on the Sustrans weekend and absolutely loved the site, not to

mention all of the wonderful volunteers.

I would like to say that we had a brilliant time at Green and Away – everything was smoothly organised my you, Helen and your team of volunteers. I hope we can do it again next year! We will be in touch.

Hope all is well and you have had a successful season! Thanks again for providing us with such a fantastic venue for our FestiVol, the volunteers are all still talking about it. 

Here’s wishing all our past and future delegates, past and future volunteers and trustees a very Happy Christmas and best wishes for the New Year.  We hope to see you all again on site at Green and Away in the near future.

 

Looking back at the past few summers

December and the end of the year is a good time to look back back at the past and see how far we have come.  Green and Away has been in the business of hosting conferences for most of it’s 21 year history.  It started out from very humble beginings when the Green Party decided to celebrate it’s 18th birthday in a sustainable way by holding a festival on a farmer’s land.  It was so successful that it was decided to do the same the following year.  However it was a lot of work for one weekend and it was more sensible to use it for more than one event. That, and the recognition that there was no environmentally sound conference venue in the UK, led to inviting a second organisation to use the facility in the third year, and some ten organisations in the fourth year! With each year we have become more sophisticated, refined and complex so that we can provide really comfortable camping for our delegates as well as a unique conference experience.  We know we do what we do well, because the feedback we get is consistently good.

The comments from Tom are typical of the feedback

I wanted to thank all of you at Green and Away for hosting a really wonderful conference with WFA/GGA.  You provided the ideal venue for us, with delicious food too served every day; and I know that a lot more people as well as I were delighted with the result.  The event provided such a good opportunity to meet and share ideas and information with like-minded people. I realise that you all work very hard to do so.  Thank you indeed

 With good wishes,

Tom Gabriel,

One of the reasons why we have evolved they way we have is that we listen to the positive suggestions made by delegates and organisers and try hard to implement them where we can. And at the end of each season our trustees gather to review the summer to see what improvements we can make so that we can continue to make the Green and Away experience even better year on year.  We are looking forward to making the 2012 summer season our best yet!

Our welcoming entrance

Summer 2011 Review

The summer of 2011 was another great season for us – but then they usually are!  It was our 21st Birthday and we celebrated with our most loyal customers, Resurgence Readers.

Pete, our founder and Chair, cuts the marquee cake!

We hosted 4 wonderful events including Sustrans and the Beekeeping Alliance for the first time, and we put on our own conference called Let’s Grow Food.

Over the 2 months we operated we hosted 370 delegates, prepared 4820 meals (not including breakfasts), and had 101 different people working on site representing 11 different countries.  Excluding trustees and interns that is 82 volunteers!

As well as building Green and Away and hosting conferences we built a permanent disabled toilet and refurbished the composting toilets, refurbished the showers, scaled up the solar power, repaired benches and furniture, built two tea chest basses, a music stand, added to the Artist in Residence sculptures plus much more.  That is a lot of creativity!

Now we are planning next season and looking to fill up our summer season.  We already have 3 conferences booked for next year but have space for several more, and we want to give more people a chance to come and experience the magic of time spent at Green and Away.