The BREAD Movement:

Bridging Resources for Ecological and Art-based Development

On December 9^th, 2009, at the World Summit on Climate Change COP 15 in Copenhagen the International Council for Cultural Centers launched the BREAD Movement: Bridging Resources for Ecological and Art-based Development as the world-wide informal movement connecting people who are starting to come together in various settings, places, and with various people to make bread and art together, even if there is no particular Bread House or community cultural center involved. Within the framework of the Culture Futures Global Meeting on Arts and Ecology(http://www.culturefutures.org) the Bread Houses Network participated in preparing recommendations to the UN Global Forum on Climate Change COP15.

The mission of the BREAD Movement inspires people from around the world to join and make the first step toward sustainable, responsible lifestyle: making one’s own bread, and making it collectively as a leisure entertainment!

The BREAD Movement was conceptualized with the creation of the first Bread House community cultural center in Bulgaria in May 2009, associated with the Slow Food International Movement and Terra Madre Network of more than 80,000 Food Communities on all continents (http://www.slowfood.com and http://www.terramadre.org). Other Bread Houses (or cultural centers with BREAD Programs) were already inspired in 7 countries, and Service for Peace International (http://www.serviceforpeace.org) is working on incorporating the BREAD Program in their efforts to consolidate Communities of Peace around the world.

The BREAD Movement is propelling world-wide a long-term series of collective bread-making activities to build the bridge between art and ecology by organizing:

• making bread together (ecologists argue that making one’s own bread is the first step to sustainable lifestyle; for its sculpture-like nature, bread-making is also among the most engaging means of communication and engagement)
• in inter-generational and inter-ethnic mixed groups
• as an artistic, amusing, and bonding experience (animating the bread-baking time with arts activities, discussions, and trainings)
• held regularly, weekly or monthly,
• at a) community cultural centers (you can identify centers in your country and neighborhood through I3C’s website www.international3c.org; or locate other local centers and networks/associations of community cultural centers and let us know); or, b) if no such community center exists, initiate a BREAD Group in a private home/living room and work in the long run to create a Bread House, “bread” standing for the actual food and also for its mission of “bridging resources for ecological and arts-based development”: in this long-term effort to create a center, it is important to seek partnership with the local and national authorities and private donors, and to also conecptualize how to multiply the Bread Houses and develop a national network, center by center, in different neighborhoods to secure sustainability in systemic social change;
• no need to seek external/donor funding for the basic BREAD Movement activities (while often partnerships are needed and healthy for the creation of centers and their networks, as specified above): it takes not money but inspiration and readiness to share and exchange ( flour, ideas, and artistic skills) as the driving force for the groups to meet and build a sustainable community; not waiting for project funding is also a crucial way to develop local actions free from the dependency on the imposed Western “project thinking”;
• engage locals (from all ages) to voluntarily lead the bread-making and connect it to other creative/arts activities they know (anyone is an artist!:, from telling stories to knitting, painting, doing amateur theater or rapping);
• develop the arts during the bread rising and baking time (if no oven is available, each person can take the risen dough home to bake).

Bread-making as an art form and educational technique and research (focus group discussions) methodology has already been tested by Nadezhda Savova (I3C president, researcher fellow at Princeton University) in workshops she organized in around-the-world conference trip over 3 months in 2009, developing the BREAD Movement concept. Nadezhda has observed how bread-making is among the most effective methodologies for engaged education and community participation, as it has also widely drawn men, who rarely participate in standard educational and community arts workshops.

Workshops with different religious groups and immigrant communities, as in Cape Town with Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, African animists, and atheists, showed the unifying and peace-building power, not in inter-religious “dialogue” but inter-religious “making” the most basic and universal human sustenance for life! Bread as a symbol and as a tactile experience also embraces spiritual and religious values, and communities within the BREAD Movement are encouraged to think how to inter-weave the community ecology with local spiritual practices, so sustainability would have strong roots in people’s hearts and minds as much as in their local soil.

The way I3C strives to propel ecological change systemically is by engaging into the BREAD Movement activities the world-wide I3C associated national networks, making up thousands of centers. Where such national networks of community cultural centers do not exist, I3C has the mission to capacity-build and back up local civil society in their dialogue with governments for the creation of a local and national network of community cultural centers, which could also become, when incorporating bread-making and ecology in their work, members of the Bread Houses Network and the Global BREAD Movement.

I3C has already consulted cultural officials in Argentina, Costa Rica, and South Africa on strategies to develop and coordinate such national networks, whose administration and animation is then decentralized at the community level to local organizers. I3C believes that sustainable change on a large scale has to be rooted deep locally while it is multiplied and connected as a pattern nationally and internationally, in particular networks of physically built collective space due to their permanent local presence and ability to bring the community together.

The BREAD Movement is a global initiative but carried very locally like grains of wheat in the hands of individuals and communities across continents, where people unite around a table because of love for the small things in life – the loaf of bread and the poem – taking action to save their food diversity and cooking traditions as a way to save their social and spiritual vitality. In the same way that a bread cannot be made by one individual grain of wheat, so it takes people in a community to come together, carrying bits of flour to add to a bowl. As we knead a reality of more flavor and touch in modern society, round tables connect around the globe like nodules in a net:

grain by grain, one bread at a time

THE BREAD METHOD

The key to the amazing spread and success of the BREAD Movement and the Bread Houses Network is due to its ultimate simplicity: you do not need anything else but flour, water, and hands! And as most with great ideas, it was simply the change of a few aspects of a familiar local practice and symbol – like bread – and it can turn into a catalyzer for cooperation and problem solving to building sense of community in highly-mixed, inter-ethnic neighborhoods around the world.

HERE BELOW ARE BASIC STEPS in the Bread Method which can always be modified to include  local arts forms and strategies.

Steps in Workshops, Classes, and Community Activities Parallels between bread-making and problem solving and community building

• Aerating (called ”humanizing”) the flour: during this process, begin to freely brainstorm ideas on a certain topic; as ideas are let out of one’s mind to “breathe” and shared with others, more possibilities open up for them to acquire oxyden and be”humanized”and realized
• Sifting the flour: beginning a gradual process of ordering the ideas in thematic categories
• Adding the yeast (and salt and sugar): the facilitator adds critical analysis and more ideas not considered so far by the participants, acting as a catalyst for new ideas
• Adding the water, gradually mixing and kneading long, with balanced pressure: a process of consolidating the initial and the latter ideas into a coherent system with well-defined and also inter-connected spheres useful in an integrated, holistic approach to social well-being
• Letting the dough “sleep”/rise (40 minutes to an hour): avoiding hurried conclusions and actions, leave time for ideas to “sleep over,” to germinate and evolve, so that the ensuing action has much greater chance to gain success and sustainability;
• Baking the bread (if no oven is available, each person can take the risen dough home to bake): engage local volunteers (from all ages) to animate the baking time with arts/creative activities and workshops that could also have themes about ecology and sustainable living (here is a small list of possibilities: write and read poetry, draw and paint, knit and embroider, carve wood, play a musical instrument, sing, dance, rap, story-telling (collecting local histories), create theater skits and scenarios, create short documentaries, develop local photography, etc.)
• Breaking the bread: break the divisions between professions and isolated local organizations, as people from diverse professions and age groups get used to regular art and weekend outdoor activities beyond the bread-making

FACTORS IN SUSTAINABILITY

Tips for continuity in community programs and local voluntary engagement

• Shifting the time-bound project thinking: Project to Program Shift
• Shifting the money-based project limitations: Assess your local assets, not problems, as a proven “asset-based development approach” in positive psychology
• Shifting the place-less (home-less) project activities: Strive to connect action to place (ex: regular activities at a community cultural center), creating meaning and belonging to a place through Em-placed Programs
• Shifting the outcome-based emphasis in project thinking to a sensitivity to the process how social relations evolve toward shared goals

WHY BREAD?

• Bread is universally present and loved around the world (even rice and corn-based cultures have rice and corn breads), consumed by people without division of economic status, age, gender, ethnicity, religion, education,etc: therefore, bread is a universal experience and a universal language to unite and educate
• Can be made by anyone, from child to grandparent, and is at the same time the most entertaining cooking activity
• When people share food, they are very much likely to establish peace and cooperation
• Creating, not passively consuming, bread and art inspires the confidence that there are creative solutions to any problem, and that problems are not as grave as imagined