The Festival of Commoning is a space to build the commons, together. For those of us working on the ground—building the commons, running food co-ops, fighting for digital rights, or trying to manage a shared resource—the work can feel both vital and isolating. We’re all pushing against a larger, more powerful system, often with limited resources and in our own separate silos.
This is an invitation to change that.
The Festival of Commoning in Stroud this September is a dedicated space for practitioners to gather, share tools/insights, and tackle the real, messy challenges of building and defending the commons. With about 100 places left, we want to ensure those spots are filled by the people who live and breathe this work.
When: September 13th & 14th, 2025
Where: Lansdown Hall & Centre for Science and Arts, Stroud, Gloucestershire
A Gathering for Doers
Commoning isn’t an abstract theory; it’s the practical, often gritty work of creating systems that serve people, not profit. It’s about reclaiming what’s ours—our land, our housing, our food systems, our data—and governing it collectively.
This festival is designed for:
- Practitioners who can share hard-won lessons from their housing, food, energy, or land projects.
- Organisers looking for new models of community ownership and governance.
- Tinkerers, artists, and strategists who are building the culture and infrastructure of a collaborative future.
- Anyone who believes that community-led solutions are not just possible, but essential.
What We’ll Do Together: The Agenda is the Work
We’ve structured the two days around sharing knowledge and building solidarity.
- Sharing Knowledge & Practical Tools: We’ll hear from people who have been navigating these challenges for years. People like Pam Warhurst (Incredible Edible), who will share insights on scaling community food projects, and Indy Johar (Dark Matter Labs), who will explore the deep structural changes we need.
- Learning from Lived Experience: The programme is filled with case studies on community solidarity, crisis response and meeting our needs. This is a chance to get under the hood of existing projects, ask the difficult questions, and learn from their mistakes so we don’t have to repeat them.
- The Unstructured Work: Some of the most important work will happen in the gaps— over a shared meal, or in a conversation sparked in the hallway. In these peer-to-peer exchanges, the real collaborations begin.
Why This Gathering Matters Now
We’re at a critical juncture. The need for resilient, community-owned infrastructure has never been more obvious. This festival is a chance to move beyond our individual projects and build a more cohesive, powerful movement. It’s an opportunity to pool our knowledge, share our strategies, and strengthen our collective resolve.
A Note on Tickets
We have around 100 tickets remaining.
Our goal is to make this event accessible. We’ve priced tickets as low as we can.
If this work is your work, we hope you’ll join us. Bring your questions, your successes, your failures, and your energy.
Book your place at the Festival of Commoning
Here’s the lineup:
Friday 12th September
Simon Opher
Prior to becoming an MP for Stroud, Simon worked as a full-time GP. He was awarded an MBE in 2016 for introducing and advocating social prescribing (now part of NHS policy nationwide) and was instrumental in the building of the Vale Community Hospital.
Simon Lennane
Simon Lennane is a practicing GP and an author of Creating Community Health. He explores the social context of health and the important role that communities play in keeping people healthy, improving our well-being and making sure we remain connected to the community.
Rob Callender
Rob Callender is the co-founder of Kin Cooperative, a not-for-profit community-based financial platform and network. He is also a senior yoga instructor, and a movement organiser and activist focused on debt, ecology, and mutual aid.
Sara Arnold
Activist and co-founder of Fashion Act Now, tackling the problem of industrial Fashion, not just in opposition to extractivist, growth-based industrial Fashion but especially for the alternatives to the industry: clothing cultures that nurture people and planet. Defashion, degrowth, decoloniality and promoting a fashion commons.
Sonia Bussu
Sonia studies and teaches public policy at Birmingham University. Her research interests are participatory governance, democratic innovations, and arts-based methods for public engagement. She led on projects on youth participation to influence mental health policy and services, coproduction of research on health and social care integration, models of local governance, and leadership styles within collaborative governance.
Tony Cealy
Tony uses participatory democratic processes that are joyful, creative, and accessible to local citizens, advocates, and policymakers in order to co-create policies and practices towards an equitable and just society. He collaborates and partners with artists, charities and community audiences who want to drive social change in how they think about, and experience the world.
Matthew Slater
Matthew Slater develops software for complementary currencies. He co-founded Community Forge for collaborative credit schemes; he co-authored the Money & Society MOOC and co-drafted the Credit Commons white paper, a proposal for a global solidarity economy money system, based on mutual credit principles.
Dil Green
Dil is the founder of Mutual Credit Services and co-founder of Local Loop Merseyside. He is building a bridge to an economy underpinned by collaborative finance – where the tools for exchange and investment are controlled by and for value producers in the real economy, supporting community wealth, the circular economy, and the broader commons.
Tom Woodroof
Tom fell down the money and commons rabbit hole after reading about mutual credit on Lowimpact.org. Along with Dil Green, he co-founded Mutual Credit Services and Local Loop Merseyside. He also convenes the Circular Trade Analytics forum. He has a Ph.D in applied nuclear physics from the University of Liverpool.
Bruce White
Bruce is an anthropologist and co-founder of the Organization for Identity and Cultural Development (OICD). He pioneered a multi-disciplinary methodology for analysing and developing narratives that can counter polarisation, propaganda and ‘weaponisation’ of identities. OICD’s work is focused on building societies more resilient to identity-based conflicts and manipulations.
Indy Johar
Indy Johar is co-founder of darkmatterlabs.org focused on the strategic design of new super scale civic assets for transition – specifically at the intersection of financing, contracting and governance for deeply democratic futures. Founding director of open systems lab, seeded WikiHouse (open source housing) and Open Desk (open source furniture company).
David Heath
David is the founder of Liberating Structures London. An experienced systems architect, engineer and technical leader. David is also an experienced facilitator and has designed and conducted large scale engagement and goal setting workshops for groups from 15-80 people.
Claire Mellier
Claire is Knowledge and Practice Lead at Iswe Foundation. She is a facilitator, process designer and researcher in participatory and deliberative democracy. Claire is the co-founder of the Global Citizens’ Assembly. She co-initiated and designed the Global Assembly for COP26 and is now working with partners to establish the Global Citizens’ Assembly as a permanent feature of global governance for COP30 and beyond.
Saturday 13th September
Pam Warhurst
Incredible Edible was first established in 2007 in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, in response to increasing global concerns over climate change, food sustainability, and community change. Since its emergence, the idea has spread to hundreds of communities around the world. Today, there are 120 official Incredible Edible groups in the UK and over 700 worldwide. It currently grows food on 9,763 sqm of land.
Andy Goldring
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.
Jess Steele
Jess is CEO of Hastings Commons. Since 2014, Hastings Commons have 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.
Jem Bendell
Jem is an emeritus professor of sustainability leadership with the University of Cumbria. He founded the Deep Adaptation Forum to support peer-to-peer communications in developing positive responses at the individual and community levels to societal disruptions induced by climate change.
Adam Greenfield
Adam is the author of Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire. he recovers lessons from the Black Panther survival programs, the astonishingly effective Occupy Sandy disaster-relief effort and the solidarity networks of crisis-era Greece to show how practices of mutual care and local power can help shelter us from a future that often feels like it has no place for us or the values we cherish.
Carne Ross
Carne is a former British diplomat turned anarchist who resigned over Iraq War. He founded the world’s first non-profit diplomatic advisory group Independent Diplomat, and have been supporting the struggles for liberation, self-determination and democracy in Myanmar, Western Sahara, Syria, South Sudan, Yemen, Kosovo to name a few.
Claude Hendrickson
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.
Marcus Saul
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.
Zoë Blackler
Zoë is Kairos’s founder and director. She is a journalist, editor and climate activist, having worked on investigations for media outlets and non-profit campaign groups including The Guardian, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Which?, Privacy International and Reprieve. She has an MSc in Social Anthropology from University College London.
Guy Standing
Guy Standing is a British labour economist and academic. In 2025, he partnered with Kairos to launch a series of discussions on the future of the commons, focusing on frameworks for reclaiming and governing resources for collective benefit. Through this collaboration, Standing highlights how stewardship of the commons can counter economic insecurity and serve as a foundation for a more equitable society.
Saturday Night Comedy
Wendy Wason
A Scottish actress and comedian, Wendy was already an established actress with roles in Coupling and the IT Crowd before launching her comedy career in 2004, getting to the final of Funny Women and semi-finals of So You Think You’re Funny at the Edinburgh Fringe the following year. Wendy has performed across the globe and has provided tour support for Katherine Ryan, Shappi Khorsandi & Tatti Mcleod.
Jake Donaldson
Jake Donaldson is a rising star of the UK comedy circuit, known for his sharp wit, intelligent humour, and warm storytelling. He was a finalist in the BBC New Comedy Award 2024 (broadcast on BBC1), and a semi-finalist in British Comedian of the Year 2024. His style is thoughtful yet playful, often exploring themes of mental health, relationships, and the quirks of modern life with an authentic Northern charm.
Bas Rahman
Bas is an incredible talent, with a cheeky and dark style of comedy mixed in with very well crafted routines that cover everything from her Muslim heritage, race, sex and anything that is taboo in her life. Bas will find the funny in it. A very gifted writer Bas has written for Mazwan Rizwan, Never Mind The Buzzcocks, been part of the BBC Writers Room as well as being part of the ERA:5050 which was an all female writers room set up by Polly Kemp & Lizzie Berrington
Funmbi Omotayo
Funmbi is a force of nature. A circuit headliner who boasts a host of awards including Best Newcomer At The Black Comedy Awards, Winner of Amused Moose & Leicester Square Comedian Of The Year. His talents have seen him perform across the globe. Funmbi has provided tour support for John Bishop & Hal Crutteden, has popped up on ITV, BBC, Comedy Central & Channel 4 and to top it off has performed two shows at the Edinburgh Festival.
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