For Coffee & Breakfast 

We recommend Star Anise Cafe open from 8:30

Woodruffs Cafe up the high street is open from 8

For Coffee & Breakfast 

We recommend Star Anise Cafe open from 8:30

Woodruffs Cafe up the high street is open from 8

Registration & Wrist Bands

Registration & Wrist Bands

Public Health and Social Connections​

Simon Opher & Simon Lennane kick off the festival with a participatory talk about the social context of health and the important role that communities play in keeping people healthy. 

Collaborative Finance Stream

Matthew Slater, Sue Bell and Dil Green introduce the Collaborative Finance stream at the Centre for Science and Arts.

Payments, savings, investments, issuing loans, bonds & shares are essential functions in our complex society. But we rely on a unfair, private, even omnicidal financial system for all of these things. Can we collaborate to make a better financial system? Should we?

Commons Governance

Dil Green, an expert in developing commons models invites us to consider what it takes to govern the commons as a community. How various stakeholders can be configured in a way that creates material interdependence and long term stability. 

Bringing Small Businesses into the Credit Commons

Small, independent businesses are essential to the character, prosperity, and resilience of our communities, but financial capitalism and systemic breakdown are making it harder and harder for them to survive. Tom Woodroof introduces Local Loop Merseyside as a bridge into the Credit Commons for small businesses, offering immediate financial wins coupled with feedback loops towards increasing collaboration and localisation.

Lunch

Lunch

Fashion Commons

Big Fashion is fundamentally exploitative. Members of OurCommon.Market put forward the idea of fashion, clothing and textile commons as instrumental to a degrowth society and economy. They advocate for a vibrant pluriverse of alternative fashion systems. They view fashion commoning as key to decolonisation, changing our relationality with people and nature, and to decoupling our clothing culture from growth. 

Liberating Structures

David Heath invites us to come map and imagine how our movement grows together, and learn some practical tools you can use in your own work using innovative, participatory structures.

Innovation in Participatory Democracy

Welcome to our Legislative Theatre workshop!

Together we will:

• Add your voice, your ideas, your lived experience and make a performance!
• Explore the proposals. Contribute. Participate.
• Together, we’re turning theatre into policy.
• It won’t just be about watching a play where you clap for and forget.
• It’s about building something together, it’s a movement that keeps growing.
• Let’s reimagine what democracy can be.

Liberating Structures - Continued

Innovation in Participatory Democracy Continued

Financial Commons - Kin Coop

People have saved money together for thousands of years. Rob Callender's interactive session holds a mirror up to the financial power we have but are giving away and presents how Kin Cooperative has brough a thousand year old idea online to empower communities of all kinds. 

Zen & the Art of Commoning: an Inquiry by Design

Chris will share practical insights from his work, showing how complementary financing and creative legal tools can unlock new pathways for community-led enterprise and funding. He’ll explore real examples of how these innovative methods support cooperative economics, empower local initiatives, and offer extraordinary solutions to today’s pressing economic challenges.

 Commons Lab

​Michel and Chik are launching the Commons Lab - an emerging support organisation aiming to help design, test, and scale commoning initiatives.  Our activities will be structured around three core streams: R&D (model development), fieldwork (pilots & deployments) and education/communication and advocacy. Find out how we're preparing for explosive growth of this sector and plug in with your expertise.

Lunch

Lunch

Permaculture and the commons

Find out about how permaculture is being used within land & farming, housing & energy, community organising & education, how some initiatives already fit within the commons framework, and why many more could. Andy will talk about how the Association is itself a form of commons, and how the organisation and network mesh together through 'polycentric governance' and attention to good relationships. With support from researchers at the Ecological Citizens Network we have been reviewing what we have learnt over the last 40 years and are preparing for a major new phase. Can permaculture + commoning become a new operating system that enables citizens and communities to respond and adapt to the ecological, social and climate emergencies? Come along and contribute your ideas, connections and energy.

Trinity Rooms & NoSH: Building Community Through Collaborative Governance

Discover how Trinity Rooms in Stroud uses sociocratic governance to create genuinely democratic community space. As part of NoSH (Network of Stroud Hubs), they demonstrate practical alternatives to hierarchical organising through consent-based decision-making, interconnected working circles, and collaborative resource sharing. Interactive Session: This isn't just a presentation - we want to learn from your experiences too! Share your community organising challenges, explore solutions together.

Incredible Edible and Right to Grow

Pam Warhurst is the cofounder of Incredible Edible with a powerful message 'If you eat, you're in'. Their vision is to create kind, confident and connected communities through the power of food. Their recent 'Right to Grow' campaign explores how to release parcels of unloved local authority land effectively so that communities can secure free leases to cultivate the land, and allow those groups to bid for the land should the authority decide to sell it. 

Great Reclamation

Biophysical, economic and social data all point towards an unfolding process of creeping collapse. This situation is not an accident, but a result of economic systems. Rather than demonising an opposition, calling for revolution, or giving up entirely, we can turn to each other to reclaim our ability to meet our needs and aspirations. In communities around the world, this is happening already, and cooperative means of ownership and exchange will be key. Drawing his book Breaking Together, Professor Bendell will claim such initiatives can add up to ‘great reclamation’ of our power, and offer a serious way to respond to the global oligarchy that is hastening collapse. 

Hastings Commons

Jess Steele shares stories from Hastings Commons who've brought over 8,500 square metres of floor space into custodian ownership across a whole cluster of buildings in the centre of Hastings, renovating them to a high quality, offering genuinely affordable rents, and supporting residents and businesses to collaborate and take more control of where they live and work.

Island Power

Marcus is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Strategy, Resilience and Security (ISRS) at University College London (UCL) and Managing Partner of Island Power LLP, a smart energy accelerator of “energy islands” through the integration of new legal design, institutions, funding instruments and technology.

Community-Led Housing

Claude Hendrickson is a community self-build advocate, commissioned to produce a 10-year strategy for Leeds Council around self-build, custom build and community-led housing, and is a founder member of Community Self Build agency. He serves as equality, diversity and inclusion advisor at Leeds Community Homes and the Confederation of Co-op Housing  ​

Co-Creating Community Access to Land: Tir Pontypridd

Our communities once had rights of access to land, land held in common. Over hundreds of years those rights were taken away undermining our communities . If our communities are to play a key role in helping us all to live sustainably once again then we need to re-imagine how we regain our lost rights of access to land for our rural and urban communities.