Talk to your allotment group and get your orders in early!

Interested in joining a group who can help work with Glasgow City Council to help identify new land for allotments?
The webinar on Thu 19 November is a chance for anyone who’d like an allotment to meet up, think about how to respond to last month’s meeting with representatives of the council, and decide what productive action to take next.
The meeting will take place on Zoom.
Following a successful meeting with representatives of Glasgow City Council, we’ll be holding a next-steps meeting for anyone who’d like to help us move forward with finding new land for allotments.
If you’re interested, you can get involved in our next meeting on 19 November.
Come and join us on a tour of Graham Bell’s Forest Garden – Thursday July 2, 7 – 8 pm
The video will play for the first 30 minutes, and afterwards you can take part in our discussion with him about growing food organically.
Put your name on the list and we’ll send you the link to join the discussion!
If you’d rather watch the video on your own first, you can watch it here in your own time.
Officially a general term meaning ‘Conference of the Parties’, the most well-known COP is the annual conference officially known as the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
The 25th annual COP – COP25 – was recently held in Madrid (although it was originally planned for Chile, before civil unrest took hold and it was relocated).
It’s a big deal, and it’s coming to Glasgow from 9 – 19 November 2020.
First up, 30,000 delegates and 200 leaders from around the world are expected to arrive in the city, so you can expect some disruption. They’ll be based around the Scottish Events Campus, so security arrangements and travel around that part of the city are likely to be affected.
You can also expect accommodations to be booked up around that time of year, and with Greater Glasgow’s population temporarily growing by 5% (but likely all packed in around the middle), there’ll be a lot more people all competing to be fed and entertained in the city centre. Worth noting if you have any big events during that couple of weeks…
Secondly, each COP comes with an informal fringe, which is an opportunity for the public to get involved.
Totally self-organised, and separate from the actual summit, COP fringe events are a place for the public to get involved and talk about climate change issues.
From campaign groups and protests to local food-growing organisations and educational activities, it’s a chance for a wide range of people to have a platform.
The Science Centre won’t be big enough (or just won’t suit) a lot of the activities people want to run across the city, though, and it’s important that everyone with an idea for a fringe event has a space to collaborate and organise.
Over the past few months, a national group has started to self-organise. Representatives from lobbying groups, environment-focused NGOs (think Friends of the Earth), trade unions, climate justice organisations, and local community groups have all entered the mix.
This group doesn’t go by an overall name, but you can think of it as a coalition of UK civil society groups. Broadly, it’s anyone who isn’t part of the country’s official, governmental involvement.
You can read more about them at https://cop26coalition.wordpress.com/
‘We are working in a broad, diverse and inclusive formation to organise ourselves as UK civil society around COP26 and are in the process of establishing UK-level and Scottish-level coordinating groups, with Scottish representation on the UK group and strong communication between the two groups.’
COP26 coalition
Short answer – think about whether:
Some of the GAF members were invited to the most recent coalition meeting in November – you can read about what happened and decide if you want to get involved.