Who Am I As Place? Practice
A practice for changemakers to explore who they are as place, to close with belonging gap within themselves first, so that they can engage communities in this work from a deeper place of healing and hope.
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.
Who Am I As Place? exists to meet that gap.
Who Am I As Place? is a guided, small-group reflective practice.
It supports a shift from transactional facilitation and problem-solving, towards imagining and creating just regenerative futures from our own sense of belonging.
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 must first unlearn, re-orient, and listen differently – to become aware of how our own relationships with landscape, heritage, language and languages, and our connection with Nature, shape how we engage our communities, stakeholders and partners.
We come home to our own place-based pluricultural identities in the present, so that we can narrate the futures that we want to shape from deep authenticity.
From here we can move towards indigenous wisdoms and learn to inhabit even deeper 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.
For each of us, it’s a moment of grace, where we change where we think, feel, lead and speak from.
When we do this, we change the stories of, and in, our selves, our communities, and our organisations.
Doing this changes everything. Words are magic.
When this is useful
This practice is particularly relevant if:
You feel something is missing when you are facilitating community engagement.
You feel a growing misalignment in how trusting relationships are being built and explored.
Exploring sustainability solutions feels disconnected or performative.
You sense the limits of current approaches but don’t know how to shift.
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.
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, and is working to engage communities, stakeholders, partners, or teams to enable social, economic and environmental change.
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.