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.
Big tech monopolies continue to increase their influence over our lives. Join us to find out about the community based alternative – Community Tech – where community businesses are driving innovation by creating and owning their own tech solutions to meet their specific needs, the need of their community and peers, and which aligns with their values.
This session will introduce Community Tech, the early adopters, what’s next, and encourage a discussion to consider how we can tap into more community innovation around technology.
Fergus is the Digital Innovation Manager at Power to Change, a charitable trust that backs community businesses. Fergus has been with Power to Change for 6 years and is currently leading on Community Tech and Digital Transformation. Outside of work, Fergus is helping to build community resilience in his local area.
Councillor Asima Shaikh is the Executive Member for Inclusive Economy and Jobs at Islington Council.
Polly Robbins is a member of Outlandish, a London-based worker cooperative that builds websites and data tools for social impact. Outlandish reinvests all surplus into supporting radical technology and developing the co-operative economy. For the last 5 years Polly has been running SPACE4 - a workspace that supports these endeavours and boosts tech skills. SPACE4 has been spearheading Cooperate Islington, currently one of the UKs biggest projects to support the co-op economy and Community Wealth Building. Polly will be talking about how this project has developed and what it might mean for the new economy in coming years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An interactive rap workshop where you'll write and perform your own verses within groups.
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!
How can community organisations lead the just transition? There is huge commitment from communities across the country to step up climate action. But it is not always clear what this means in practice and how climate focused activities can be resourced. Join Locality and friends to hear different ways community organisations are putting the climate crisis at the centre of their missions and how to overcome obstacles to becoming community climate leaders.
The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, reflecting on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, saw the historical period of the 1990s as inaugurating "the End of History" - an epoch in which all major political questions were thought to be solved, and politics was essentially a process of "good governance" rather than changing society. In recent years, though, we have seen this settled state of affairs overturned across the world, not least by Brexit and Trump in 2016, and then by the global Covid shutdowns, and the prospect of global conflict in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
If the End of History was about boring politics, this certainly isn't the case any more. How should we understand the ways politics in the UK and beyond has changed in recent years - and why did this happen? In this session, we look to provide an account of how we exited this "End of History" period and what that means for democracy, the Left, and class at the post-2016 period we can call "the End of the End of History".
Medium-intensity cardio workout to a punk and ska playlist.
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.
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.
We all breathe over 20,000 times a day, but when was the last time you paid attention to a single breath?
Changing the way you breathe can change the way you think and feel. The session by Sara from Breathways provides an opportunity to find your balance through your breath. Relax and destress in the moment and learn valuable tools to support your wellbeing, both in the workplace and at home, supporting you to be happy, healthy, and resilient. Breathwork is a highly effective tool to proactively manage stress and reduce anxiety, as scientific studies have shown that it can reduce cortisol, the stress hormone, by up to 20% after just one session and by up to 50% when repeated regularly. The techniques that Sara teaches are simple and simply transformational.
Come along and give it a go and do bring something to sit on.
The Roundabout Swing Band bring the classic sounds of 30s and 40s Paris into the modern era. Led by accordion and violin, the band cook up a sizzling selection of the finest manouche swing, hot club jazz, musette waltz and gypsy bossa. Backed by a super-tight rhythm section of guitar and double bass, the band will have you swinging along in a flash!
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.
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.
The culture and the policy environment around the successful growth of community business and community investment has, up to now, disfavoured the worker co-operative sector by excluding the model from support programmes and guidance resources. Mark will explore how we got here and we'll discuss some of the ways that we might use new models to empower workers in the next generation of community businesses.
Principle Five of the Cooperative Aims and Principles is Education, but it is not immediately clear how, or if, this translates into practice. Movement-led education is currently thin on the ground, and relationships between grassroots movements and the increasingly neoliberal world of universities are equally scarce.
In this session we'll be hearing from academics working with cooperators on the coproduction of new research with ambitions to strengthen cooperative forms of education.
Torange Khonsari is Co-Founder and Director of the urbanism, public art and architecture practice Public Works. Torange has taught architecture and design for 21 years, and currently teaches Design for Cultural Commons at London Metropolitan University. her strategic design practice focuses on transformational design, design as form of inquiry, and design intervention as forms of new urban imaginary.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A session to close the festival.
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.
Uffculme, Devon EX15 3DA
What3words: ///ourselves.pocketed.herbs
Stir to Action’s Playground for the New Economy Festival is held at our very own New Economy Centre at Selgars Mill in Devon.
Selgars Mill is in Mid Devon between the villages of Uffculme and Willand and has good links to rail and road networks.
By train
Selgars Mill is 2.5 miles from Tiverton Parkway train station, which is:
By bike
On an arm of the number 3 national cycle network route.
By bus
Selgars Mill is on the number 1 bus route from Exeter to Tiverton. Alight at Langlands and be careful of the busy road.
By car
We’d prefer you take public transportation, but if that’s not possible, pop EX15 3DA into your sat nav and it will take you directly to Selgars Mill.
Accessibility
There is very limited parking on campus for the festival for those with accessibility needs. These spaces will be used by prior arrangement only. Contact hello@selgarsmill.co.uk
Parking
We’ve secured a small car park in a farmer’s field next to our festival grounds. Car parking permits can be purchased for £10 per day here.
Arrival/Departures
Full ticket holders:
Check-in from 12:00 on Tuesday 12 July 2022
Check-out by 16:30 on Thursday 14 July 2022
Day tickets
Reception is open from 08:00 each day.
There is level access to most stages and to the camping and accessible toilets on site. There is very limited parking available for those with mobility issues, please get in touch to arrange for a space. There is level access to the Assembly Rooms on the ground floor of the mill where there is an accessible toilet. It is stepped access to the rest of the mill building.
If you have any accessibility needs, get in touch with us and we will do all we can to try and make this an accessible event.
If we have to cancel due to government guidance on coronavirus (COVID-19), we will endeavour to inform all ticket holders as soon as possible. In such an event, all fees paid will be reimbursed in full, but we are unable to reimburse any other costs that may be incurred. In the event that dates have to be changed, ticket holders may request a full refund if the new dates are not convenient.
If you have to cancel due to government guidance on coronavirus (COVID-19), you have the flexibility to move your booking to another Stir to Action or Selgars Mill event within 12 months of the festival date, or you may request a full refund for all ticket and accommodation fees, but we are unable to reimburse any other costs that may be incurred.
Refunds will only be made if a written notification is received more than four weeks before the festival. Send written notification of cancellation via email to events@stirtoaction.com. For bookings cancelled four weeks or less before the event, no refund will be made other than in exceptional circumstances at the discretion of the festival organisers. No refund will be made for non-attendance.
Sessions and the days they are on are subject to change. We will try to notify you as soon as possible of any changes. If as a result of a change you want switch days you can, subject to availability.
In the event of cancellation of the festival, we will endeavour to inform all ticket holders at least two weeks before the festival is due to take place, although please be aware that this is not always possible. In such an event, all fees paid will be reimbursed in full, but we are unable to reimburse any other costs that may be incurred. In the event that dates have to be changed, ticket holders may request a full refund if the new dates are not convenient. Should you have any questions regarding these terms and conditions, please contact the festival team via events@stirtoaction.com.