Project Regenerate — one year later
Six months after our showcase event which saw us come together on the land to perform, create and share with our local community. And one year on from the start of Project Regenerate, it’s time to share the learnings reflections from our process.
Project Regenerate was guided by Alana Bloom using the Huddlecraft (previously Enrol Yourself) methodology for peer to peer learning in collaboration with The Living Projects. For further context — this was the blog introducing the Project Regenerate cohort and read more here about the reasons why we themed this learning journey on regeneration in the face of the climate and ecological emergency.
This blog contains the reflections from our process; the questions we arrived with and the questions we were holding at the end of the process. It also details what we ended up choosing to offer at the showcase and some insight into our learning journey and process.
Jae
Learning question you started with: How can I deepen and expand my relationship with regenerative practices?
Learning question you ended with: How can I live regeneratively? i.e not burnout!
Your workshop:
I kicked off the journey with a workshop exploring how I might support myself, and others, to radically reimagine living in a world without burnout. One of the ways I’ve been exploring how we might live regeneratively is through holding collective dreaming spaces. I use a framework of What Is, What If, What Now to ground us in our current stories and experiences we have about burnout, leading into reimagining practices that help us dream into a regenerative future that will support us and the more than human world. We then end the session with finding ways we might take that next small step together to support ourselves now.
Any reflections on the journey/process:
Having the space to intentionally focus on identifying and developing practices that support me to be regenerative and not burnout has been fundamental in the last 6 months. The relationships we’ve built with each other, and my deepening with the land has grown into a beautiful community, and with their continued support helped me develop better boundaries which are key to not burning out! This journey has also further clarified how important artistic connection, exploration and performance, for myself and in community, is to my wellbeing and joy. I’ve learnt so many songs, written some of my own and become more confident in sharing poems and music in a group. Finally, I’ve been deeply influenced by others in this journey and continue to believe in the power of peer learning.
Your offering for Showcase: What if questions from our Reimaging Burnout workshop.
Viktoria
Your learning question: How can I turn climate concern into an opportunity for intergenerational, collective action?
Your learning question now: How can climate concern be an opportunity for intergenerational support?
Your workshop:
‘Let’s talk about our climate feels’ focused on creating a space where we could feel safe to explore our feelings around the climate crisis. I used activities from The Work That Reconnects by Joanna Macy, and part one of the session focused on establishing firm roots in gratitude, resulting in a collective ‘Gratitude Map’.
The second part was a ‘Climate Listening Circle’ where we spoke and actively listened to each others feelings and pains for the world, first in a smaller group setting and later reconvened in an open-ended discussion about our experiences.
Any reflections on the journey/process:
This peer-to-peer learning space has been really impactful for me, both for my personal development but it also reinvigorating my professional journey by just following my curiosity for the past 6-months. It filled a real gap of structured and collective, yet not institutionalised learning outside of formal education. Most importantly, it enabled me to connect with others with similar interests but from vastly different backgrounds and attend workshops I otherwise would have not felt able to access. My learning question evolved from focusing on the ‘active’ part of activism to the ‘being’ in activism and allowed me to tap into the knowledge of elders around me. My next aspiration is to set up a space where young and elder activists can connect and embark on an intergenerational mentorship journey.
Your installation: “Activism and Intergenerational Support; in conversation with Elders” (20-min short film)
For the past 6-months I’ve been on a learning journey into what intergenerational support can look like in environmental activism, to make our actions sustainable and regenerative. This is an initial edit of interviews I’ve done with people in my local surroundings who I’d consider to be elders. I’ve asked them the questions that I’ve been battling with and I hope their voices will offer you, whether you consider yourself to be a young person, an elder or somewhere in-between, clarity if you were having similar queries.
If you are interested in taking part in upcoming intergenerational mentorship workshops (whether as a young person or elder) you can register your interest (v.erlacher@hotmail.co.uk) and I will be in touch with you!
Sara
Your learning question: How can I build a nature-connected, radical-diasporist Jewish youth movement?
Your workshop: For my workshop I focused on the ancient Jewish concept of ‘Shmita’, a once in every seven year rest & release for the land, exploring what this radical concept might have to teach us in an age of relentless drive toward work & productivity. We began with a deep-time visualisation around cycles of time & rest. Then I offered a core-grounding in the concepts of Shmita & invited us into enquiry with our own heritages and traditions, exploring our own relationships to rest cycles and mapping possible futures where rest was integrated and affirmed in our culture.
Any reflections on the journey/process:
My question focused on the very real task I’ve been dreaming towards for the last decade & found myself imagining more seriously during lockdown. Over the course of the project, my question developed into many strands. In particular was the ‘how’ of the content — building an educational curriculum based on the weavings of these threads that haven’t quite been distilled in the world yet. And also the ‘how’ of the movement building process. How does one create and maintain a juicy, sacred container on Zoom?! How to inspire & retain committed, visionary organisers? How to tend my own health & sanity in the face of start-up energy overwhelm & imposter syndrome?
This has been a powerful journey of leaning into my vulnerability in order to learn. So much of what I remember from my academic studies involved such painful, isolated learning experiences. When we did come together to ‘learn’ to ‘create’, it felt forced, awkward and like no one really wanted to do it.
Here at Project Regenerate, learning became celebratory, it became about us, about who we really are, our curiosities, what we wanted to discover. This made our learning a liberatory and revelatory process, an emergent process, allowing what wanted to be revealed, to be revealed. It was also hard work, a lot to engage with and exposing but I noticed again and again the more I leant into the process, the more I was held by it.
This process was so important for my question, having so many beautiful & brilliant minds supporting my enquiry and my articulation of what I found along the way. It was also an amazing way of landing in Devon, connecting to Pondfield & building such sweet relationships with other participants.
Your installation: The Dreamboat — A vessel for sacred emergence
Sofia
Your learning question: Do we inherit trauma and can we heal from it?
Your learning question now: What is trauma? Do we inherit it and can we personally and collectively integrate it?
Your workshop:
My workshop focused on stories, journeys, ancestry and the idea of home. We began by walking the land and returning to the collective with stories from our journey, collecting gifts from the earth for the opening of a ritual space. Having brought some Russian tea as a link to my own ancestry, we spoke of the significance of tea in so many cultures globally, the ritual of this in its own right, what a linking force it can be within community.
Predominantly the workshop focused on a guided meditation to meet an ancestral guide, the offering very broad in terms of living, passed, human, non-human. I was humbled by the depth of the work for some of the group. It really affirmed the power and gifts available in this line of exploration, whilst highlighting for me further areas of my own development I’d like to nurture if continuing work of this nature.
Any reflections on the journey/process:
It’s been magic! What a beautiful place of holding and emergence the group and the land has been for me.
I have felt so supported to lean further into challenging edges whilst allowing myself to fall back into rest and resourcing when needed. It has been a place where the only thing I strive for is to turn up as myself, in as much integrity and authenticity as I can.
I have made beautiful friends and connections which have fed me in all the best ways, quite often literally, with the most incredible food. As well as my creativity and vulnerability has been allowed to flourish and been received with open arms.
And what a gift it has been to see the Regenerate space offering these gifts to others too. To see them stepping into their sticky shadows and softening light, to share their warm hearts and hugs, their brilliant minds and artistic souls.
Your installation:
Snippets of a Show in Progress. 2 or 3 spoken word pieces splattered throughout the day of an semi-autobiographical theatre show I’m working on called “Misplaced” which follows the coming of age stories of my great-grandmother in revolutionary Russia and myself in my early twenties moving up to London.
Fyn
Your learning question: How can I use theatre to channel my feelings, and process the climate emergency?
Your learning question now: How can I offer my creativity as a way to process the grief and joy of being on earth?
Your workshop:
I am curious about how we can address the ecological emergency from an intuitive/ creative place. With this in mind, I held a space for exploring what different responses arise in us when we think about the phrase “climate crisis” and all that phrase holds. We used objects to represent the climate/ ecological crisis and witnessed each other in our interactions with that object. There was space to improvise and move and find a curiosity in the things that arose, and then time to be witnessed on stage with the warmth of the group as an audience. It felt very profound: full of grief and joy. It was so beautiful to witness each persons unique offerings. I loved every second of it, and had fantastic feedback- this workshop was a big step for me.
Any reflections on the journey/process:
This last 6 months has been incredibly powerful for me. I am constantly seeing more ways that it has nourished me. Working alongside so many wonderful people with their incredible ideas helps me feel passion for what I’m doing. I have seen my challenges come up and that has all been part of it. My journey has been one of reconnecting with the magic of being alive and following my interests from a really hearty non outcome based way, and yet being challenged gently to share outwardly, which I can find hard. I have made some lifelong friends and have seen such a big shift in my confidence as a theatre practitioner and workshop facilitator. That is massive right now and is going to feed my life in a big way. Thanks to Alana for her skilful and responsive holding, and for everyone for bringing their unique wonderfulness.
Your installation:
My offering is a 15 minute part-improvised performance, weaving together some of the journey I have been on in the last 6 months. How can I return to my human body with guidance from the animal world? If I sink into my own body will I remember that I am part of earth? Trigger warning: May feel intense and uncomfortable at times.
There will also be a corner somewhere with some of my Hare journey documented and collected, and I may be getting up to something interesting at my Hare station, come find me!
Samson
Your learning question: How can I bring a deeper sense of spiritual practice and intersectional justice to my work as a food grower?
Your learning question now: How can seed be a vessel for justice, healing & connection?
Your workshop: In my workshop, I invited this learning community to the land on which I live and tend. We sowed seed together, had time to sit with the land, held seeds in our hands and reflected on their ancestral wisdom and profound potential, explored the politics of seed and witnessed some radical examples of seed sovereignty in the face of capitalism and systems of domination, appropriation, commodification and violence. We shared examples of saving seed, both in theory and in our own lives.
Any reflections on the journey/process: Rilke says: “Live the questions now. Perhaps you then may gradually, without noticing, one day in the future live into the answers.” I’ve been living these questions for some time now, but Project Regenerate provided a framework within which I could be witnessed and held accountable in living this question. Regenerative practice, we found, is slow and restful. Which means, the process itself had to slow down. I didn’t seek outcome, rather a deepening sense of practice.
Small changes came in the form of deeper connection and contemplation in the physical processes of growing, planting, harvesting, sowing. I found energy to write blessings to be said throughout these daily moments of work in the garden that can so often be detached in the rush of trying to get the work done. Prayer and deepening spiritual connection to my work has been profound.
My question shifted after my workshop to focus more clearly on seed. I felt a creative shift in focusing on the power of seed across the interweaving sections of my original question. It feels clear to me, seed can be a vessel for connection to place/land, ancestry/culture, deepening personal practice, regenerative practice and political sovereignty/’power with’. I feel now at a point in which to bring this question out into the world in an expansive sense. I hope to bring this in the form of workshops exploring these themes, for seed growers, veg growers and market gardeners, and for allotmenteers or the general public and those interested in connecting further and deeper with land.
Most importantly, though, I feel this journey has been about building community with a beautiful group of people, seeing them flourish in their own individual expressions of themselves and the questions that guide their lives, seeing them ‘in their power’, offering their work with openness, playfulness, joy, love and care. We are living in such profoundly dark times, such unprecedented times of uncertainty, and yet beauty and realness is unwavering. There is so much beauty in this world and so much to live for, and so many people to live alongside, doing the good work, and this feels even more deeply affirmed through my project regenerate journey.
Your Installation:
A collection of vegetable, herb and flower seed of many different varieties, with an invitation into contemplative practice with a seed, and an invitation to add to this inquiry by sharing your answer to my learning question in its new form.
Winnie
Your learning question: How can I draw on my past work and experiences to best engage communities in land and nature, considering accessibility, inclusivity, diversity and the barriers individuals in rural areas can face?
Your learning question now: How can I better align myself with the environment and in turn bring others to it?
Your workshop: For my workshop I drew on my practice as a dance artist and community arts practitioner to explore ways of connecting to our self, each other, our environment and non-human beings. My work with dance, improvisation, and contact improvisation explores ways of moving beyond the self, being entangled and connected and moving with shared attentiveness and communion with my surroundings, including the environment and those I share the space with. How can I use this to encourage deep listening, attention and connection between our land and communities in a more ecologically focused practice? Moving, listening and talking all feel very important.
My workshop took part outside, mostly in the meadow and followed this structure:
A group check in (talking in a circle)
A gentle warm up to wake our bodies.
A grounding exercise developed by the wise and wonderful Gill Clarke.
A guided Deep Listening moment.
Pair exercises exploring touch with another body.
The ‘finger dance’.
Flocking and murmurations.
A reflective solo time. To sit with nature and write, draw, record, dance and reflect on the attention and listening and experiences we have just created.
A group walk through the fields beyond Pondfield, discussing the following questions:
“What does connection mean to you?”
“What is community?”
“How do we help bring nature connection to those that may have barriers in accessing this, in an inclusive and supportive way?”
A sharing of final thoughts/stories/songs/poems that respond to the workshop.
A check out.
Any reflections on the journey/process: The process has been big. We have all had highs and lows, frustrations and revelations and it feels like the beginning of a very long and continuous question for me. I know now that this question is going to take me a long time to answer, will constantly evolve and is both personal, social and political. The process at the start was a maze of inspiration, overwhelm and opportunity, that through following these led me into a new parallel career pathway with an environmental CIC that places community engagement at its core. Managing this new learning and working, with other jobs and artistic practice has at times felt full and this question has at times both rocked and supported how I sit within these. But I very much feel that I am living my question and learning along the way. Small changes, learnings and reflections have also fed into my personal life, from the food I eat, the way I take a walk, how I choose to rest, how I notice and tend to my thoughts and anxieties have all changed as part of this process. It has been wonderful to be held and supported by such a beautiful group of peers and receive their knowledge and care over the past 6 months. Supporting one anothers journeys and questions over this period has been equally rich.
My question now feels the need to explore how we align and connect in a non-hierarchical, horizontal and better entwined manner with both human and non-human, giving space softly to others to perform, teach, learn, feel heard and represented. This applies to people, plants, fauna and all other sentient beings. As performers, leaders, activists we are taught to take up space, to act, to vocalise and I have often felt tension in this. I question that this feeds individualism and neoliberalism which totally isn’t useful if we are to care for our communities and environment, we don’t need to dominate, strive, progress, grow. We need to listen and give and tend. How do we create space for this? For so much and so many.
Your installation:
It’s a series of invitations, of small exercises and reflections left around the 4 acres of Pondfield to do on your own or with another.
Alana
Your learning question: What art does mystery want me to make in this time of unravelling?
Your learning question now: How can I continue to regenerate and resource myself through my creative practices?
What you did for your workshop: My workshop was titled ‘Making Art with Mystery’ and for this meet-up I tried to throw my facilitator hat and handbook out the window and let mystery guide whatever wanted to happen. My main hope was to use this as a creative space to help us root in the natural more-than-human world and to use my emergency strategy practice for it to be resourcing for myself and my peers.
I started by guiding the group in an opening ritual where we honoured all the beings seen and unseen that are a part of the 4 acres of Pondfield. Then I invited the group to go and spend some time on the land being with how we were feeling and maybe what was happening in our lives. I then invited people to do some authentic movement being witnessed by each other where we were telling the story of our time on the land through movement. It was then mirrored back by each person’s partner. We finished the workshop on the meadow exploring the archetypes of Bill Plotkin’s Wild Mind Map and working with them through movement and improvisation.
Any reflections on the journey/process: Project Regenerate was my third learning journey I have hosted with Huddlecraft (Previously Enrol Yourself) and I wanted this to be more about my creative process and practices and finding space in my busy life to be with my creativity.
I think what I realised through this container is that whilst my life is often very full, the creative practices that were so present in my life when I was working as an artist are still infused in my everyday life, I just struggle to find ways to share them and to carve out more time to support myself in those practices.
Being on the land from the depths of winter through to the peak of Summer has been so powerful, to see the land change through these three seasons and see it mirror our own journeys. I feel like the friendships and explorations through this practice have been such a grounding space through the challenges life has thrown at me and feel a real abundance at the end of this journey from passing my driving test, buying a house and getting a new job I feel as though this space has allowed me to arrive at this transitionary moment in my life close to my own creative world and dreams, and to carry them alongside me in this next chapter.
What your installation is: Moving with the Otherwise — A short film that includes videos I captured of nature and me moving in the landscape over the past six months, read alongside a piece of my poetry. I’ve also included various pieces of poetry I’ve written in recent years, other words of inspiration and a variety of collected things that mystery has offered up as a muse for my creative unfolding.
Millie
Your learning question: How might we deliver regenerative environmental education grounded in community?
Your learning question now: How can my livelihood embody regenerative practice and promote healing through nature- connection?
What you did for your workshop: Forage and Feast — We spent time walking over the beautiful Pondfields site, identifying many different plants and discussing their heritage and healing properties. The group were guided in how to safely identify and forage with care and we shared our plant stories together as we walked in the sunshine.
After this, I created a tea station using seasonal, local, foraged plants. We selected our own herbs and discussed the benefits of understanding the plants around us and how they hold incredible properties to help us thrive.
Finally, we joined together for a seasonal foraged feast I had prepared, using ingredients from around South Devon.
Any reflections on the journey/process: This extraordinary journey has held me in a time of huge transition of career change and more; to be accountable and to commit to a regenerative livelihood. The group have been incredibly nurturing and I have gained so much from sharing this journey with them. I’m leaving this Learning Marathon full of knowledge, inspiration and joy to continue the work I have begun into the second half of the year. This includes beginning work as a playworker and setting up my own business running nature connection events. I’m excited to see this evolution and am grateful to the Enrol Yourself process for the guidance it has given me.
Your Installation:
Millie made a foraged feast for the event and our guests.
Will
Your learning question: Something like… As I learn to code and to work with data how can I make sure I align my efforts with local efforts to resonate with a more participative, regenerative society?
Your learning question now: How am I in relationship with the South Devon bioregion?
What you did for your workshop: We voyaged on the Dart in a single canoe, large enough to seat us all. We traveled from Tuckenhay to the Dart and up towards Sharpham, pausing to take in the nesting egrets up in the trees, the cormorants diving and the fish flying. We were even lucky enough to be visited by a seal. My colleague Hal from Canoe Adventures regaled us with some of the history and some of the wildlife living in this part of the estuary. We stopped on the river banks for a fire and a meal we had made with food that was mostly grown nearby, feeding off the same water that feeds the Dart. We got back in the canoe and paddled home, singing songs and sharing poems. On the way home a man in a neighbouring boat sang us a shanty, his crewmate humming backing vocals.
Any reflections on the journey/process: The experience has been exactly what I’ve needed it to be, with a slightly ineffable quality, not necessarily being able to say what that has been. Perhaps I needed a safe container to rest and to play, or a little accountability to live more in line with my values and my interests. Perhaps I needed to meet some other people locally who care about the things I do, not in the same way but in a similar enough way that going through this experience with them has loosened a feeling that the world’s problems rest on my shoulders. A phrase that’s come up from different people in the group is having a sense that they’ve been ‘living their learning question’. For me this rings true. If you asked what I have to show for my efforts over the last six months the answer would be immaterial. Yes I have made some practical changes to the food I’m buying, how I’m spending my time and the type of work and volunteering I’m doing which is more bioregional than before, but the main takeaways are embedded in the experiences themselves. There was something magical about this project, something unpredictable about every workshop and a sense that what has emerged from our time together is much greater than the sum of its parts.
What your installation is: An interactive taster of some of my lines of enquiry into how I am in relationship with the South Devon bioregion. Exploring kinship in a modern geographically dispersed world, the places we inhabit as containers for our psycho-spiritual development, my story writing explorations, the Dart as the heart of our bioregion and what is distinct about South Devon.
The Future of Project Regenerate
Project Regenerate was pitched to the Community of Dragons at the Local Entrepeneur Forum in September 2021. Because of this opportunity to pitch, the Project Regenerate peer to peer learning journey was partially funded by the local community and four people donated pots of money to offer accessible low cost and bursary places — without this support we wouldn’t have been able to offer the 8 low cost places that we did!
The vision for Project Regenerate is to continue it as a initiative of The Living Projects — a living breathing offering of it’s own. However it will take some new form — still with the core of peer learning, regeneration and facing the climate and ecological emergency but perhaps in a different structure or format.
If you live in South Devon and are relatively local to Dartington, Totnes where The Living Projects is based and you’d like to hear more when the next iteration of Project Regenerate goes live, then drop me an email and I’ll keep you in the loop. — alanahydebloom@gmail.com
In the meantime…
Gratitude and a big thank you to the cohort (Sara, Will, Jae, Fyn, Samson, Sofia, Viktoria, Winnie and Millie — you guys rock!) the land, all the people that came to our showcase, Jay Tompt, Huddlecraft and Zahra Davidson, the steering group of The Living Projects and all the local community who continue to support initiatives like this.
