7 - Field Dynamics and Strategic Neutrality

Summary

Playing the field

‘I mean I would love to get somebody to pay us to have a full-time gardeners who could just do the garden, just do what they want. So but that's not really going to happen.’

Oliver (interview, July 2015)

As Oliver and the other staff at the Woodlands Community Development Trust (WCDT) noted, funding the garden itself, as a garden, independent of any kind of agenda, is a deeply unlikely prospect. Like many community organizations, then, WCDT play the game of funding, becoming a legible organization, playing by the rules and applying to carrying out projects that meet the aims of funders while trying to balance this against their own goals. This is a precarious balance, and one made harder by the increased competition and declining funding within the sector (St Clair et al, 2020). This game, however, what we might call the field of social relations in which the WCDT act, shapes in important ways the daily activities of the organization and the broader political possibilities inherent within it. To understand how politics and justice are curtailed within a collective context such as community growing requires a foray into the practicalities of community organizations and funding context. The contrast between the organizations in terms of their position within this field of action is particularly illustrative here. Their contrasting levels of formalization and the struggle over the meadow highlight the complicities of organizations in depoliticizing community growing as a phenomenon, despite the internal dynamics of autonomy and revaluation described in previous chapters. In this, escape is limited by the context from which it is attempting to turn away, but in which it is still embedded.

WCDT place a strong emphasis on finding funders whose aims align as closely as possible with those of the Trust. This is one of the main teachings of a seminar that Oliver, the manager and main fundraiser at the Trust, expounds to a room of charity colleagues in Glasgow in September 2016. The seminar is itself a fundraising exercise for Woodlands, explored for its capacity to bring in extra funds not earmarked for anything else (known as ‘unrestricted funds’). Oliver's learning emerged from years of practice and missteps along the way, including a brief foray into eco-driving lessons in the early years of the garden.