One of YoCo’s intentions is to create a neighbourhood where children play in the streets. We used our Community Plan for York Central to map out all of things that would make children playing in the street possible – from removal of cars to having eyes on the street from known adults through a mixture of economic activity and places to sit and spend time.

But in order for children and adults to play out in the streets, we also need some games to play!

At the Table Top sales YoCo is co-organizing with St Barnabas Church – and in collaboration with Heidi Moon – we’ll be asking any and all to delve back into memories (whether 50 years ago or last week) to share games and to play them live in the church grounds.

What games did you love? What games would you like to pass on?

One of the powerful things about the Table Top Sale is that it is – in a very everyday way – ‘taking back the economy’, in the words of feminist economists J.K. Gibson-Graham with Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy. J.K. Gibson-Graham have long argued that while we too often accept ‘the economy’ as this external force that we have no control over, actually ‘our economy is the outcome of the decisions we make and the actions we take (Gibson-Graham et al, 2013, p. xiii). The hope Gibson-Graham’s work offers is that if we start to see the economy as something that we make through our everyday choices then we can take ‘economic matters into [our]… own hands to help create worlds that are socially and environmentally just’ (2013, p. xiii).

In essence, YoCo’s approach to change is ‘Propose, Don’t Oppose’. We’re not entirely sure how that phrase emerged or who we nicked it from, but one of the people who helped shape YoCo – Rebecca Carr – used to have a Buckminster Fuller quote as her email signature ‘You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete’. So it may have evolved from there.