Summer updates

Reflecting on partnerships full of potential and playing with unlikely metaphors.

After a Spring of transforming from seed to green shoot—introducing our work and listening to our community—our flower bloomed, and the pollinators followed. The partnerships, relationships, and networks we’ve cultivated are now packed with potential, ripe for positive change.

We’ve been busy bridging gaps and strengthening connections—handcrafting the social infrastructure to ensure the grassroots efforts of our rural community are no longer overlooked and under-supported. In the past few months, we’ve reached nearly every corner of our bioregion, meeting with local businesses eager to support transformative change, grassroots organisations ready for collaborative action, and individuals keen to get involved. We've engaged with 63 organisations and 103 individuals in the last two months.

We’ve also had many conversations with larger national and international networks and funders, who are asking how best to support grassroots change. It’s brilliant to hear these crucial questions being asked and to contribute to these discussions.

Below you’ll find a few updates and reflections. As always, we choose to spend more time in our community than behind a computer screen, so this is a bit messy, but that’s fine.

Strengthening Partnerships

All our work happens through partnerships. Rather than creating new initiatives, we first focus on helping existing ones in our bioregion reach their full potential. Here’s a glimpse at some of the conversations and plans in the incubator:

• Collaboration with Sustainable Dorset continues to strengthen the resilience of grassroots projects across the county. And we’re excited to be contributing to discussions about the formation of a similar supportive structure in Somerset.

• The intergenerational exchange of knowledge is being supported, while our bioregional fibre movement is gaining momentum—closing the gap between farmers and crafters and amplifying their stories.

• Local art takeovers are being planned in response to increasing violence.

• Localised funding models are being built for town-based environmental groups.

• Maps are being brought to community events so that residents can come together literally map local grassroots projects and better understand just how much is happening in our bioregion.

• Mentorship is being provided to young environmental volunteers.

• Spaces are being created for women in sustainable agriculture to connect and share knowledge.

• Engagement with Transition Groups across the South West is happening with Transition Together, building their UK-wide local movement from the bottom up.

• Contributions to discussions on Somerset’s food system resilience are being made, ensuring tourism strategies support the local economy and keep funds within the community.

• The potential of market towns as hubs of social innovation is being explored.

All arm in arm with some of the most incredible local businesses and organisations in our area. All of it for the benefit of this rural community. It may look like a messy list to some, but for us, this is localised system design in action—we’re bringing all these threads together to strengthen our place’s fabric. We’re sitting at the intersection of food, fibre, economy, funders, business, and non-profits—right where we need to be to support the formation of self-perpetuating local systems that supports the health of our community and place.

Playing with Unlikely Metaphors

To help us imagine our work in new ways, we’ve been playing with metaphors. An unlikely one that stuck was using compound interest to understand our community-building efforts. We wanted to share it with you.

Just as compound interest grows by earning interest on both the initial investment and its accumulated gains, our local work within our community aims to build and amplify positive change through a similar process.

Our initial investment is community engagement, laying a strong foundation, understanding the place and local context, asking what’s needed. As we strengthen relationships and networks across the bioregion, these new and stronger connections act like interest, adding to the overall resilience and capacity of the community. Each collaborative effort and shared lesson contributes further, creating a cycle of innovation and increased agency.

Over time, these efforts culminate in a more vibrant, interconnected community, with enhanced agency, fostering greater collaboration, and building a more connected and supportive network in our area, continually strengthening the conditions for transformative positive change. Just as compound interest turns small investments into significant returns, our work aims to transform initial community efforts into substantial, lasting impacts, reinforcing and expanding resilience, creativity and cohesion.

And then we share the model with other places, and the tapestry grows, and so does the compounding effect…

A riff: The Cultural Implications of Systemically Flawed Support for Grassroots Projects

“Your culture is not what your hands touch or make – it’s what moves your hands.”

-Tyson Yunkaporta

Reclaiming community-led grassroots work as a community’s collective creative expression of how to care for each other and the land, is vital. Inadequate support structures and systemic barriers are reducing these efforts to isolated, struggling initiatives, eroding a sense of movement, and limiting the creative potential of rural grassroots efforts. This undermines a place's culture, diminishes a community’s sense of agency, wipes out local economies and restricts our capacity to care for one another.

These grassroots efforts are essential in addressing local needs, from supporting the community's most vulnerable members to promoting place-adapted ecological sustainability. They know their places. They know their people. They empower individuals and connect communities, often leading to increased civic engagement and participation. It is in these communal spaces that relationships are forged, enabling a community to act cohesively and unlocking the creative potential of a place. This is culture.

We are not blaming individuals for not engaging in grassroots efforts. We are blaming an economic system and policy choices that enforce barriers to community involvement. A system that prevents us engaging with these communal efforts is deeply flawed.

A healthy society is one where residents can come together without systemic barriers to decide how best to care for each other and their surroundings. We’re working towards those systemic shifts. We’re envisioning this future and growing the mechanisation to support it, alongside many others.

Reciprocity

In the spirit of brutal honesty: a lot of the work we do is free of charge. We’re building financial resilience while supporting our community in the most affordable way we can. We’re actively searching for forward-thinking funders who want to learn with us and support the resilience of our work. If you can support and want to learn together, please do get in touch.

That’s enough waffle!

See you soon,

The TLP Team