Schedule
Friday 12th 2025
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
Matthew Slater, Sue Bell and Dil Green introduces the innovative ideas behind Collaborative Finance, mutual credit and how credit commons protocol can connect it globally.
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
Sara Arnold, co-founder at Fashion Act Now shares her work in building clothing cultures that nurture people and planet and how we could build a fashion commons.
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.Dinner
We are currently negotiating with local independent providers please check back for more details.
*Dinner is not covered by the festival ticket. These are recommended places to eat out which supports local businesses.
Friday Evening
Lansdown Hall
Trinity Rooms
PM
Social, economic and Governance Innovations in Commoning
Indy Johar (Dark Matter Labs), Bruce White (OICD), Claire Mellier (Iswe) and Dil Green (Mutual Credit Services) introduces their work and discuss how the intersection could be explored to build a stronger movement.
Lansdown Hall
Centre for Science and Arts
Morning Tea/Coffee and Networking
Morning Tea/Coffee and Networking
Kairos
Kairos is a not-for-profit CIC founded and directed by Zoë Blackler, a journalist, editor, and climate activist. The organisation serves as an events space focusing on exploring the social consequences of the climate and nature crises through real stories and lived experiences. Join us as Zoë and economist Guy Standing share powerful stories from real-life contexts, drawing on their experiences and the many inspiring speakers they’ve hosted at Kairos.
Lifehouse:Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire.
Adam Greenfield author of Lifehouse, recovers lessons from the Black Panther survival programs, the astonishingly effective Occupy Sandy disaster-relief effort and the solidarity networks of crisis-era Greece, as well as municipalist Spain and autonomous Rojava, to show how practices of mutual care and local power can help shelter us from a future that often feels like it has no place for us or the values we cherish.
Lunch
Lunch
Permaculture Association
Chief Executive of the Permaculture Association, member of Leeds Permaculture network and active teacher and designer. Also working in Leeds on the Climate Action Leeds project, developing a city hub - Imagine Leeds - as a climate action hub and space for participatory design.
Trinity Rooms & NoSH
NoSH (Network of Stroud Hubs) is a partnership organisation of 6 community hubs. More information coming soon.
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
Tir Pontypridd
Ken is the chair of Tir Pontypridd. A community-led initiative in Wales, owned and run by its members. Membership is open to anyone, and the money raised from the membership fees help to purchase land for community use.
Dinner
We are currently negotiating with local independent providers please check back for more details.
*Dinner is not covered by the festival ticket. These are recommended places to eat out which supports local businesses.
Saturday Evening
Lansdown Hall
British School Hall
7:00 - 10:00
PM
Accidental Anarchist Film Screening with Carne Ross
The film provides a unique insight into the way anarchism works in real life, following Ross from his beginning as a patriotic Brit, to his career as a top diplomat. The documentary highlights Ross's experiences, including his work in the 1990s where he witnessed Iraqi children dying of starvation as a result of the sanctions he helped impose.
The film documents Ross's transformation from a loyal diplomat to an anarchist, as he questions the motives behind the Iraqi invasion and the role of Western Democracy. It includes his meeting with Noam Chomsky, where they discuss the fundamentals of anarchism and the need for free creative work and control over one's life. The documentary has been praised for its thought-provoking content and the personal narrative of Ross, with first-hand experience at several turning points in modern history.
Comedy
Wendy Wason, Jake Donaldson, Bas Rahman and Funmbi Omotayo joins us on Saturday evening to finish the Festival of Commoning with a laugh.
Venue: British School Hall