This is a very rare opportunity to play some of the many village games and folk sports that were the main form of exercise in rural northern Europe until their decline in the 19th century. These games challenge our strength and coordination through solving unusual physical challenges, contorting ourselves into strange shapes and using leverage or a partner to create resistance.

Drawing mainly from the research of Jorn Møller, we will also explore the social function that these games had and consider how modern attitudes towards exercise fit into that tradition. The session will be seriously non-competitive and no experience of strength training is required.

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The Black & Green Ambassadors Programme exists to connect, empower and celebrate diverse leadership and community action on environmental issues in Bristol and beyond.

Join this year’s Ambassadors Ella, Miss Divine, Rosina and Ruth to learn more about the programme and join the conversation on challenging perceptions, creating new opportunities and working towards ensuring the environmental movement is inclusive and representative of all communities.

At the turn of the new millennium, forces in and around New Labour initiated a political coup against co-ops, installing in their place a new discourse of social enterprise and entrepreneurship. Join Les Huckfield – the author of How Blair Killed the Co-ops – to discuss what this paradigm shift has meant for the radical postcapitalist potential of the cooperative movement and how we might reclaim social enterprise from the neoliberal turn.

Since 2017, six community rooted organisations and four national organisations have worked together testing the idea that kick starting and nurturing networks of social businesses can actively tackle economic inequality in areas classed as the most ‘deprived’ across England. In this reflective session, we will share our learnings and obstacles from five years of working in a place-based way, through Empowering Places, a pioneering programme, funded by Power to Change.

We’ll discuss our experiences of starting new businesses, shifting power with local authorities, taking over assets, and coaching individuals to test out new ideas. You’ll hear a range of voices for an honest reflection on the funding’s legacy in Plymouth, Hartlepool, Leicester, Bradford, Wigan, Grimsby, and the broader new economy agenda.

Put on a state-of-the-art mixed reality headset and experience a simulation that integrates into your surroundings and helps alleviate pain. Expanding perception and playfully hijacking attention, Easel helps users transgress pain. Easel has been developed for Varjo XR-3, the most advanced Mixed Reality headset the current market offers, featuring a human-eye resolution display, with unparalleled hand and eye tracking.

At Animorph's monthly 'Research Lake' sessions, workers investigate medical applications of Mixed Reality. We found that immersive and contextual experiences are well-documented in helping people who suffer from chronic pain.

Find us during the festival to try Easel, and experience the future of Mixed Reality.

Portrait photographer Pete Millson will be shooting this year's festival and then hosting a live projected exhibition on Thursday in the barn stage.

Pete has six of his portraits in the National Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection and is always on the look out for significant visual moments that confer dignity on the people in his photographs.

Our personal and collective experiences are inextricably linked to wider social and economic structures. Join a brief and confidential one-to-one personal support and solidarity session, available to anyone who may be currently experiencing poorer mental health or wellbeing.

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Note: These sessions do not provide emergency/crisis services or ongoing therapy.

Sally Zlotowitz is a Community & Clinical Psychologist and is currently the CEO of Art Against Knives and the Co-founder of Psychologists for Social Change.

Cultural Commons can offer a new way of designing equitable cultural practices that consider social and ecological care. For this to happen we need to dig into forms of production, origins of materials we use, forms of exchange and dissemination of these cultural artifacts, and in turn the system of objects they construct outside commodities. By placing cultural production within the commons there is the potential to systemically shift how we labour and structure relationships of power.

For this workshop, attendees will be asked to map a cultural/artistic project they have done exploring the types of goods they have produced and its production methods, mapped against the cultural commons model. We will discuss the types of cultural common goods produced or needs production and obstacles we may need to overcome to construct a cultural commons system towards a commons sphere.

An interactive rap workshop where you'll write and perform your own verses within groups.
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Learn transferable lyric writing skills and embrace your inner rapper. We'll also be giving some lucky individuals/groups the opportunity to perform on Wednesday evening of the festival!

This session, by Jessica Prendergrast, one of the co-directors of Onion Collective CIC will explore the reality of building a new economic model in Watchet, Somerset, following the launch in September 2021 of their flagship East Quay project.

Framed within their work on Attachment Economics, which examines three forms of connection that flow from community - attachments to place, people and through time - the session will unpick the experience, ambitions, and obstacles of community enterprise over more than a decade of practice.

Rebecca Trevalyan, is a co-founder of Library of Things.

A current project I'm leading is a programme called Platform - to change property uses, practice and ownership in UK town centres. Partners include Power to Change, High Streets Task Force, British Property Federation, New Local, Radix & Shoosmiths.

We’ll be taking different perspectives on what democratic finance actually means for businesses and individuals. We’ll discuss the experiences of a variety of co-operative and community businesses across the UK which are increasingly turning to community shares to finance their start-up and expansion. We’ll also hear from Tony Greenham at South West Mutual (and formerly of the RSA) on the wider movement of people-powered banking.

Isaiah Hull is a writer and spoken word artist from Old Trafford, Manchester and is one of the Roundhouse and BBC Radio 1Xtra's Words First finalists. Isaiah has been a member of Manchester's young writers collective Young Identity since 2006.

Communities across the country are finding new uses for empty historic buildings in their town centres. Hear about how the Architectural Heritage Fund is helping groups take ownership of heritage assets to create new community space and reinvigorate high streets. Two urban projects will share their experience of acquiring old buildings, and the process of bringing them back to life – the House of Annetta project at 25 Princelet Street, London, led by Assemble Studio, restoring a vacant 18th century townhouse to create a new social centre to support those working for housing justice and land reform; and a project led by Cliftonville Cultural Space, formed to save and convert a former synagogue in Margate into a cross-cultural multi-arts hub.

Panel discussion, introduced and led by Laura Williams, Programme Officer, Architectural Heritage Fund.

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The term “community-led housing” emerged in the mid-2010s and covers a wide range of housing models and associated financial structures. Community-led housing continues to embrace a wide range of models, from social rented housing owned by development trusts, through to co-housing and some self-build schemes where residents own their own homes. It also includes housing co-operatives, ranging from government funded co-operatives from the 1970s and 1980s, through to tenant management organisations, short-life housing, and more recent and innovative forms of mutual home ownership. 

This session will seek to showcase some of these emerging and innovative models and approaches to help scale community-led housing in the UK.

Sim Wadiwala

Did someone say Festival Quiz with drag Kings? That's right! This year our quiz is hosted by Spanish drag King sensation Prinx Silver, who'll be joined by two very special drag guests. Prinx Silver will take you on a campy drag quiz rollercoaster of new economic knowledge, with fun performances between rounds!

Come for the knowledge, or come for the drag!

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Prinx Silver is London's favourite Himbo Spanish Drag King Sensation Campaigner & Host @friendsjoinersarms

Whilst new public and private investment nature restoration is welcome it risks sparking a new gold rush. Private and corporate interests are buying up land for rewilding and reforestation projects with little consideration for the impacts on local communities or wider issues like rising land prices and the loss of high quality farmland to low quality woodland planting. This panel discussion chaired by Mark Walton from Shared Assets will explore the risks and opportunities this flood of new investment in nature presents in the struggle for a more just land system.

Saunas originated in Finland many centuries ago and are commonly found in houses across Scandinavia and Northern Europe. Now you can have the Finnish sauna experience in the UK with Saunair’s traditional barrel sauna.

Sauna, meaning ‘bath’ or ‘bathhouse’, provides a way to cleanse your body through perspiration as a result of the Löyly – the heat and steam that surrounds you in the sauna as water is poured on the hot rocks.

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Part hip hop production team / part live band / part ever growing collective of musicians and vocalists based in Manchester, UK – The Mouse Outfit continue to bring their brand of jazz influenced boom bap to the masses. In the past decade, they have worked with over 85 musicians, producers and vocalists in the studio and on the stage under The Mouse Outfit banner. To this day, they have remained independent and retained their DIY hip hop sensibilities, self releasing three studio albums and an album of remixes over the last five years. A prolific music video production team – The Mouse Outfit  has garnered over 15 million views on their Youtube channel and the live show has performed in 15 countries across the globe. The funk fuelled 8-piece live band currently features 3 vocalists: Superlative, Karis Jade &, OneDa, alongside Luke Flowers (Cinematic Orchestra), one of the best drummers in the UK.

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Bowling used to be straight forward…not anymore. This curvaceous bowling alley quite literally bends the rules so the ball can return like a boomerang to strike the pins at your feet.

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