Positive Money Stall at ‘Go wild!’, Gloucester

Report by Frances Griffiths, coordinator of the Gloucester group of Positive Money supporters:

Lobbying our political representatives is important but we have to work on the grassroots too. So, in June when the Gloucester Transition group was invited to hold a stall at a ‘Go Wild’ event at Robinswood Country Park, some of us thought the event needed a Positive Money stall as well. We contacted the organizer and successfully made our case. By 29th June we had assembled a small team from Stroud, Gloucester and Cheltenham PM groups, to run the stall.

We had a gazebo and a table, with a purple cloth kindly provided by PM. We had some leaflets and forms to collect contact details. However our centre piece was an activity for children involving a tub of orange and white table tennis balls. 97% were orange to represent electronic money and 3% were white to represent cash. The aim of the game was to find a white ball without spilling any of the balls. Winners, (and every child was a winner) got one of those wrapped chocolate sweets. This was the aim of the game by the end. At the beginning children were supposed to shut their eyes and find a white ball by chance but this was difficult and boring. In order to avoid having losers, children who didn’t pick a white ball were given a sweet because they didn’t cheat, which wasn’t very flattering to those who were lucky enough to pick a white ball by chance. The children of course, were not old enough to understand what Positive Money is about. Many of their parents were very interested however and we had a lot of good conversations.

Things we’d do differently next time?Table tennis balls were nice to use but quite expensive. It would have been cheaper to go to the local scrap-store and pick up some coloured milk bottle tops. If we had made a small charge to play, we could have covered the cost of the sweets.

A banner and some posters on a display board would be worth having next time.