What is ‘the [PFAF] Charity’?

During recent discussions about the DEFRA paper, a few people in the PFAF group (mostly people newly come forward) have said that ‘the Charity’ should respond to this. I agree, of course, with what Rich Morris says about ‘the PFAF system’ having the potential to make a contribution to food security in Britain. However, at the moment, there is as yet no Charity, as such, capable of responding.

This assumption that the Charity exists and can ‘do something’ is presumably due to the Charity being still a legal entity (only just, it was almost wound up), and having had a history of activity and many people being involved. But this reminds me of a belief held by the few people still hanging on this year from PFAF’s old days, that ‘the Charity’, once it had dealt with its financial emergency, would gallop in like the cavalry and rescue the situation. By the time the emergency had been sorted, there was only me left, my two co-trustees having resigned, and the one new trustee was not yet engaged in either the old or the potential new situation. We are getting our act together, but it is still early days. We are at the stage of considering revising our aims and ‘charitable objects’, and our governing documents. We have yet to define the we mean by ‘plant-organics’, the term which we may use instead of ‘vegan-organics’, and how that new term relates to permaculture, agro-forestry, woodland gardens, conventional organics, and vegan-organics/stock free as currently understood.

'How can the PFAF Charity develop a real existence?’ is the obvious question, which begs another: ‘What would a real existence involve?’ There are things we need to do:

• assemble enough people interested in taking PFAF forward and hold a meeting;
• define an organisational structure: trustees, officers, meeting style and way of working, such as ‘Council of Management’ in which those paid for key tasks join the voluntary trustees in decision-making;
• define our Aims and Charitable Objects and revise our governing documents;
• identify options / objectives for practical action towards achieving our Objects;
• identify the main tasks and specific activities for each option,
• analyse costs, benefits and risks for each option and decide which are most appropriate and viable;
• identify the skills, level of commitment, timetable, budget for each chosen option;
• seek proposals, commitment etc. from interested parties;
• and so on.

Note that none of that requires a ‘leader’, as such. We do not need a Jonathon Porrit to be our figurehead and speak publicly for us – as Porrit did to establish Friends of the Earth as an influential organisation. Amongst the options those involved in PFAF will examine will be some which help raise our public profile. We already have a public profile due to the Plants Database being a valued resource for those interested in unusual useful plants, so we are not starting from scratch.

Comments and suggestions will be very welcome, and will help the current trustees decide what kind of meeting we shall be having in October. Meanwhile, if anyone wants to speak for PFAF in ongoing discussions beyond our group about that DEFRA paper, I would have no objection to that; I don’t feel that at this stage it would do any harm to have PFAF’s head raised above the parapet. Again, as Rich says, the ‘PFAF system’, which, like ‘plant-organics’ needs defining, does potentially have a lot to offer as an alternative land use practice, and PFAF will in future be concerned with professional rigour in this area, documenting land use experiments, measuring yields, and evaluating interesting models.

Chris Marsh