Narrating Regenerative Futures from Belonging
A reflective futures practice for closing the belonging gap
between who we are in relationship - to place, culture, and the living world - and the ways we are asked to think, speak, and act in our work.
About this practice
As people working in sustainability, regeneration, and social change, many of us have sensed that something is missing.
Despite the language, urgency, and effort, the work can feel disconnected — from identity, from place, and from how we actually relate to the world.
This is what I call the belonging gap.
It's not a lack of skill or commitment.
It’s a lack of a practice that helps us re‑orient where we are acting from — especially when institutional pressures pull us back into old logics of metrics, outputs, and transaction.
Narrating Regenerative Futures from Belonging exists to meet that gap.
Narrating Regenerative Futures from Belonging is a guided, small-group reflective practice.
It supports a shift from transactional problem-solving toward imagining and enacting regenerative futures from belonging — where relationships, care, and responsibility can flourish.
Rather than starting with tools or plans, we begin with a more fundamental question: Where are you acting from when you imagine and lead change?
Why belonging matters here
For many of us working within dominant knowledge systems, this requires a re‑orientation.
Before claiming other ways of knowing – especially indigenous knowledge - we are first asked to unlearn, re-orient, and listen differently – to become aware of how language and languages, culture, and our place-based identities shape the futures that we narrate.
From here we can move towards indigenous wisdoms and learn to inhabit place-based wisdoms.
With that in mind, this practice works with pluricultural identity as a starting point, supporting you to explore:
The culture and places and myths shaping your understanding of regeneration.
Your relationship with Nature, as lived experience.
How old stories from dominant assumptions about competition, progress and impact influence your work.
You will be guided to create an evolving map of belonging, as a living futures artefact that holds ancestral threads, place-based knowing, being and doing, and emerging insights – that can continue to inform how you show-up as a changemaker full of the courage to dare to doing things differently.
From here, you will begin to listen differently.
What this practice is (and is not)
This is not a workshop, toolkit, or a strategy session. It’s not about making plans.
It is a practice of re-orientation.
Together, we interrupt habits of silencing, extracting, and transaction.
For each of us, it’s our moment of grace for moving towards the lived experience of restoring, replacing, realigning - centred in relationships rather than dominant knowledge and logic.
When we change where we speak from, we change how we narrate futures – and in doing so, we being to change the stories of, and in, our organisations, our communities, and our systems.
Doing this changes everything. Words are magic.
When this is useful
This practice is particularly relevant if:
You feel a growing misalignment in how you are working
Sustainability or regeneration work feels disconnected or performative
You sense the limits of current approaches but don’t know how to shift
You want space to think and imagine differently, without pressure to produce solutions
What you will gain
You’ll leave the session with:
A clearer sense of where your unease in the work is coming from and how to change that.
Your own evolving Map of Belonging to guide your ways of thinking, being and doing.
Greater capacity to act from this place of belonging in your role and contribution.
The language and confidence to bring this orientation into your work settings...and others.
What you'll need
Willingness to listen – to your selves, to others, to place, to Nature.
Openness to many ways of knowing, being and doing.
Paper and something to draw with – pens, crayons, coloured pencils.
Who this is for
This practice is for people who anyone who is longing to find new ways of thinking, being and doing, who:
Work in sustainable development, sustainability, environmental education, regeneration, futures-thinking and foresight, or community engagement...and the many other names that this work falls under.
Feel the limits of transactional approaches and want a shared practice that helps them to move beyond.
Want to unlearn the old logics and restore relationships from a place of care.
Are ready to learn how to narrate regenerative futures from belonging.
Access
This practice is offered with 3 contribution pathways:
Community - £37 – for those with limited financial capacity.
Professional - £77 – for those able to make a full contribution.
Gardener - £137 – for those able in abundance who also want to pay-it-forward with a community space.
All participants take part in the same practice, in the same space.
Please choose the level that feels right for you, as meaningful work can reach us during moments of scarcity and abundance.
Let’s begin with trust.
Become part of the Flourishing Futures Collective®
This is where we continue the practice together.
Community = a 1-month paid subscription.
Professional = a 3-month paid subscription.
Gardener = a 1 year paid subscription.
About me
I’ve been working in social transformation for over 30 years, across sustainability, education, community engagement, and futures practice.
My work now focuses on helping people re‑orient how they imagine and enact change — from belonging, place, and relationship with Nature.
I hold practices that support futures literacy, collective imagination, and regenerative ways of working.
This practice is one way that work takes place.