Good afternoon jubilent Juners! 🧜
This 5 Bullet Friday comes off the back of a beautiful week in Swansea with Architects fo Air, enjoying a bounty of bara brith and baked beans on toast each morning! Now, prepare yourselves for these 5 social talking points and tools, all of which I’ve come across or re-discovered over the past fortnight. Please enjoy!
1. What I’m reading: Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future? – This provocative and contemporary take on international politics, Ukraine and our woeful future by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek is a virtuosic take-down of the global system. One thought-provoking quote: “We all want peace, but abstract calls for peace are not enough… Occupiers always sincerely want peace in the territory they hold. Germany definitely wanted peace in occupied France in the early 1940s, Israel wants peace on the occupied West Bank, and Russia is on a mission for peace in Ukraine… [in fact] today’s vision of ‘peace’ can only be maintained through local wars.“
2. Toolkit I’m promoting: Community Speaker Policy – This handy and really important toolkit produced by the European Network on Statelessness is a great reference if you’re ever inviting speakers with lived experience of forced migration or statelessness to an event. A ready-to-use set of standards to ensure a trauma-informed and respectful approach that steers clear from tokenism.
3. Statistic I’m jaded by: Skewed charity funding – “Funding in the charity sector is skewed towards those organisations at the very top… just 1% of charities in England and Wales make up 75% of the sector’s annual £90 plus billion income. Furthermore, the largest 16 registered charities in England and Wales have a larger combined income than the 160,000 charities with an annual income under £1 million.”
4. What I’m using: Google’s appointment scheduler – While I’m desperate to divorce Google, it’s not happening any day soon. Delaying that valedictory day still further is their free appointment scheduler, an impressive alternative to other 3rd party schedulers which often come at a monthly cost. You compromise a bit on beauty, but this tool helps save countless back-and-forth emails to find a common time to meet, automating the whole process. You can even book a coffee chat with me here if you’d like! https://bit.ly/meet-with-jacob 😅☕️
5. Report I’m sharing: Borders, Refugees and Asylum – It’s great to see a new report from Europe Must Act, coming in advance of the European elections this weekend. I like this common-sense explainer that covers the key topics you need to know around the development of Europe’s recent migration policies.
That’s it for this fortnight! As ever, please let me know your thoughts and feedback – and send anything you’d like me to include in upcoming editions this way.
