Our History and Background
the society
The Schumacher Society UK was founded in 1978 under the chairmanship of Satish Kumar. Since the beginning, it provided a unique forum to promote alternative ideas of human-scale development and action for local communities. It ran the annual Bristol Lecture / Conference and other lectures in different parts of the UK. It published a series of briefings and promoted educational activities through Resurgence magazine and Green Books. Following the centenary of E. F. Schumamacher’s birth in 2011, the institute superseded the Society.
THE SCHUMACHER COLLEGE
The Society was instrumental in forming the Schumacher College at Dartington in early 1991. This has become an international centre of excellence for ecological studies attracting, as teachers, many world-renowned people and, as students, people from all levels of business, government, and civil society, including many from the developing world.
There was an informal association with Practical Action (originally called Intermediate Technology Development Group), the Soil Association, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), the Jeevika Trust, Green Books, the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), and Resurgence Magazine. All of these were started, or inspired, by E. F. Schumacher and they all have deep roots in his thinking and work.
why we do what we do ~ research!
The alarm calls of environmental distress and social injustice are being heard and there is growing public appreciation that we are rapidly heading towards the limits of fossil energy and other resources. We are facing the unknown over climate change, fears over security, and a global monetary system that generates inequality and might collapse – all the while we are adding new humans at the fastest rate ever.
This perceived future is uncertain and, to those who are working for change, it can seem depressing. However, the future is what we bring forth. How we create a future, which is much better than this gloomy picture, requires a lot of thought, a lot of action and a lot of learning. This is what we mean by research and there is a great need for more of it.
The corporate responsibility movement has grown rapidly over the last few years. Many notions of sustainability are included in the activities of companies as they gradually accept a role in altering wasteful practices and see themselves acting in a larger context where social justice is prominent. Exploring these concepts and seeking ways to build sustainable systems with the corporate sector is a massive task. The same issues apply with equal vigour in the public service sector.
The combined influences of millions of individuals create many of the problems we face. How to affect individual action is of major concern and research that gets involved at this level of personal engagement and at the level of local action holds the potential for substantial change.
Government, industry, local communities, and the individual all interact in complex ways. Research is a process that holds up mirrors to this complexity. By inquiry and exploration, by experimentation at local level, by challenging what exists, we might learn how to alter our systems for the better – they might just alter because of the research.