Throughout my childhood my loving mother gave me away to other people she felt I could learn from. I know it was painful to her. I was just conscious enough to notice the moments she gave me away and when I settled into a new place with a farming family or self-sustained community, and found space for myself in it.  With the skill that only a small unconscious child has, I adapted, helping to build homes, fix cars, bake bread, wash dishes, and dig wells.  Moving 14 times by the time I was 13 years old developed self-reliance. Living in multigenerational community gave me sense of place, I found that old ladies had the same thoughts as young boys, - we all talk to ourselves about what is important and what is mundane. Everyone story while different is the same.

Planting tomatoes at a bus stop in London changed me when a 10-year-old boy stomped the fruiting plant in 2010. I was sad, because he, like me, held budding potential for a life, but full of anger he let it out on another. Roads, cars, shops, seem to be stopping the very thing they were put there to do, connect us. With 54% of global population living in cities set to reach 70% by 2050 ‘our land’ will be cities and life will be stomped constantly.

The answer to reconnect cities to the nature world is in the ‘stomped’. Allowing inhabitants to create and finance the urban environmental infrastructure that carries them and our food to our homes and through our daily lives in socially responsible way will have positive impacts not only their health but support the biosphere that provides the air they breathe, the food they eat, and the water they drink. 

The invisibility of fiduciary responsibility of capitalism blinds inhabitants from seeing the impacts of urban living. Building one vote, one share cooperatives that generate energy, visualise energy consumption allows people to understand it.

The short-term goal is to provide people the tools  to co-operatively own and manage their one infrastructure, the medium term is run education programmes for school children, paid training programmes for youths, mentoring programmes for adults and support for the fuel and food poor vulnerable residents, the long term is to build stand alone, transparent egalitarian, cooperatives that allow revenues from natural resource like wind solar and tidal that build communities to educate, train, support inhabitants to action their own needs and react a sustainable way.

The promise land for a child of 10 years old in Brixton is not a self-sustaining commune on a mountain top. The promise land for him is in Brixton. People need a way into their communities and the current system based on fiduciary system edits them out of their own reality.