A useful list of organisations “reimagining and redesigning the world they want to live in, to achieve deep, transformative change”, from JRT
Above are the kinds of dynamic cosmolocal organisations we like, currently being supported by the Joseph Rowntree Trust in their Pathfinders programme. You may recognise a few that have been well-covered in these pages - Civic Square, the Onion Collective, Freedom and Balance, Dark Matter Labs, Doughnut Economics Lab, Dudley CoLab - but there are names new to us that we’ll profile below.
We Can Make
From the YouTube blurb:
WeCanMake is a community land trust and neighbourhood test-space in Bristol, imagining and making new ways to create homes that build social infrastructure and community wealth. So far, WeCanMake has delivered two community-led, low-carbon, locally-made Living Rent homes in Knowle West – a 100-year-old council-built estate in south Bristol.
This documentary short film is a story about what community and place-led innovation looks like. Meet housing pioneering residents John, Toni and Bill, and hear about how the WeCanMake model works on the ground, and how it could be scaled and replicated by other communities across the country. Find out more and download our Playbook at We Can Make.
Resolve
Resolve is an interdisciplinary design collective that combines architecture, engineering, technology and art to address social challenges. We have delivered numerous projects, workshops, publications, and talks in the UK and across Europe, all of which look toward realising just and equitable visions of change in our built environment.
Much of our work aims to provide platforms for the production of new knowledge and ideas, whilst collaborating and organising to help build resilience in our communities. An integral part of this way of working means designing with and for young people and under-represented groups in society.
Here, ‘design’ encompasses both physical and systemic intervention, exploring ways of using a project’s site as a resource and working with different communities as stakeholders in the short and long-term management of projects. For us, design carries more than aesthetic value; it is also a mechanism for political and socio-economic change.
CENTRIC LAB
Our research lab uses neuroscience and environmental data to identify how biological inequity contributes to poor health outcomes in neighbourhoods and peoples that have been racialised and marginalised. We use this research to build open-access community tools, create new narratives and framings of health, and provide organisations with expertise and insights on health and place.
Embedded above is an August 2022 presentation by Araceli Camargo, lead scientist at Centric Lab, at the Retrofit Reimagined festival