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

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

Legal Design and Creative Financing for Commons

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.

Morning Tea/Coffee and Networking

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: 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  ​

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.