The Akashi poster exhibition was one of the main concrete ‘outputs’ of the Akashi project Phase 1. Six posters featuring many of the people we had worked with in workshops and community meetings. They present short stories about climate change and climate justice (particularly weather changes, saving energy in the home, food, transport, waste and teachings from their cultural or faith traditions).
The stories and photos in these posters were just some of the many collected during dozens of workshops and meetings with community groups and individuals in and around Cambridge. In the workshops, participants discussed what climate change is and the impact it is having and will have and they learnt about how their own lifestyles and consumptions were related to the problem. And they planned actions – individually, together with others in their family or group and sometimes politically.
Susi Miller, Training Development Officer at the Federation of Community Development Learning, said in 2009 that the posters were ‘some of the best community development learning resources she’d seen in years’.
Big versions of these posters toured community centres and public venues in Cambridge, London and beyond. Smaller versions have been shared with community groups and used in training workshops by Shilpa.
Feel free to use these posters to support your own climate change or community development learning activities. Please acknowledge their origin and direct people to this site for more info. If you need larger files, contact us by email.
You could also make your own posters (or a film or mural or..) as a community development activity.
If you found these posters helpful and would like to donate to support more of this kind of work, or to support people affected by climate change, please choose a relevant organisation or get in touch for ideas: akashilearning@gmail.com.
Thank you again, a decade later, to everyone whose stories are featured. Images and stories collected by Shilpa. Design by P Margiotta.
Akashi Archive 
Thank you Akashi project for collecting these inspirational stories and encouraging local conversations on how we can take action to protect the earth. I love how so many or our traditions and faiths talk about the importance of respecting and caring for nature and other living beings. It’s a relief hearing these philosophies in the din of capitalist individualism, which is wrecking our planet under the pretext that it will make us happy (after the next buy, of course, and then the next). Even though it is keeping us from focussing on the things that really seem to make us happy: our communities and loved ones, our creativity, our connection to the living world and our deeper purpose here.
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