It was in response to a tweet. I had written something about believing the world could be different. I don’t remember the exact words anymore, which perhaps says something about the absurdity of it. The proposition itself was unremarkable: another world was possible; the conditions we had inherited were neither inevitable nor permanent. Someone decided that imagining otherwise was reason enough to threaten my life.

I remember the momentary fear. The absurdity of being targeted by an avatar-fronted coward. And the confusion.

I had not yet understood that visibility changes the conditions under which you are permitted to have an opinion. Particularly when your work concerns power. Particularly when you are willing to name what is wrong with the world and, more dangerously, insist that we might reorganise it.

Over the years, the harassment became part of the weather of my work. Sometimes distant, sometimes close. Sometimes ridiculous enough to dismiss; sometimes specific enough that dismissal would have been irresponsible.

And then I began talking to other people doing work concerned, in one way or another, with justice. The details differed, but the architecture was remarkably similar. People had been stalked. Doxxed. Followed. Threatened. Harassed. Had their families contacted. Their addresses circulated. Their workplaces targeted. Their children mentioned. Media hunts. Smear campaigns. Intracommunal attacks. Somewhere in those conversations I realised that what had felt like an aberration in my own life was, devastatingly, ordinary. A rite of passage.

Rites of passage tell us something about the cultures that create them. They reveal what a community believes must be endured in order to belong. And if harassment, threats and fear have become informal rites of passage for people who confront injustice publicly, then there is a question we have not adequately reckoned with:

What have we decided leadership should cost?

The Mythology of Sacrifice

We have inherited a romantic relationship with sacrifice. Our histories are full of people who gave everything to struggles they did not live to see won. We tell stories about their courage, their discipline, their willingness to place something larger than themselves above their own comfort. Many of those stories deserve to be told.

But there is a danger in what happens when sacrifice stops being something people sometimes choose and becomes something leadership is expected to require. And for Black women, sacrifice has unfortunately never been a neutral proposition.

There is a racialised and gendered texture to who is expected to sacrifice, what they are expected to sacrifice, and whose sacrifice is even recognised as sacrifice at all. Black women have historically been required to labour beyond ourselves: to care, organise, nurture, protect, reproduce, resist and hold together families, communities, workplaces and movements, frequently while being denied the conditions of safety and care ourselves. Our capacity to endure has been treated almost as an innate resource.

The strong Black woman is not simply a stereotype about personality. She is a political arrangement. She makes it possible for institutions, movements and communities to depend upon Black women’s labour while paying remarkably little attention to what that dependence costs us. If she is strong, she can carry more. If she has survived before, she can survive again. If she is committed to the cause, she will understand why her needs must wait. If she loves her community, she will give a little more. And because sacrifice has been so deeply entangled with Black women’s histories of survival and collective care, it can become difficult to distinguish between devotion and extraction.

There is, of course, a profound tradition of Black women choosing to labour in service of something larger than ourselves. Our histories are full of women whose organising, intellectual work, domestic labour, political imagination and care made freedom imaginable. I do not want to flatten that into victimhood. There is agency there. Love. Strategy. Political commitment. A radical understanding that individual survival and collective survival are intertwined.

But there is a difference between choosing to give and being organised into a world that assumes your giving. There is a difference between sacrifice as an expression of love and sacrifice as the price of belonging. And there is a difference between honouring what Black women have given and constructing political cultures that continue to require it.

This is where I think some of our ideas about leadership become dangerous. We begin to treat suffering as evidence of seriousness. Exhaustion becomes commitment. Overextension becomes generosity. Exposure becomes courage. The ability to withstand violence becomes a qualification for leadership. For Black women in particular, this collides with an older expectation: that our value lies partly in how much we can withstand without requiring anybody else to stop. Beneath the veil of ‘affirmations’ we have become so accustomed to are a set of quietened instructions:

Be strong enough not to need protection.

Resilient enough to recover from what should never have happened.

Fearless enough to keep making yourself and the cause visible. But you must stay isolated with your head above the parapet.

Powerful enough that nobody needs to ask whether you are safe. But not so much that you jeapordise the status quo.

There is something deeply convenient about celebrating the resilience of Black women in a world that continually produces the conditions from which we are required to recover.

Some people arrive at leadership having been taught that their lives, privacy, health, families and safety are things worth protecting. Others arrive carrying generations of instruction that love looks like service, leadership looks like endurance, and freedom requires somebody to put their body between danger and everybody else.

When I began making decisions about my own safety, I wasn’t only negotiating risk, but an inherited idea of what a committed Black woman is supposed to be prepared to endure. And that’s why I think we need to be precise about sacrifice. The problem is not sacrifice itself. Every meaningful collective project asks something of us. Love asks something of us. Parenting does. Community does. Building anything worth inheriting will require us to give beyond convenience.

The question is whether that sacrifice is chosen or presumed; shared or concentrated; temporary or endless; recognised or invisible; held collectively or quietly deposited into the bodies of the same people again and again. Perhaps the measure of a just movement cannot only be what it is prepared to fight for, but also what, and whom, it refuses to sacrifice.

When Threat Crosses The Threshold

By the time I was thirty, we were living in the throes of COVID-19, the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the strange global reckoning that followed.

There was a sudden and enormous appetite for conversations about race, power and structural injustice. People who had been doing this work for years were suddenly more visible. Legible. Recognised. Invitations multiplied. Audiences expanded. Institutions wanted conversations they had previously avoided. Proximity to us became a kind of currency in a world seeking new kinds of capital.

And alongside that visibility came backlash. For me, the harassment became faster and more frequent. There is something particularly disorientating about being uplifted and threatened at the same time. One institution can be asking you to speak about changing the world while, elsewhere, a bot account is telling you that you should not exist in it.

Then, one day, I discovered that one of the fake accounts targeting me had been created by someone I considered a friend. That changed something.

Until then, there was a psychological distance I could maintain between myself and the people behind the accounts. They were strangers. Trolls. Faceless people on the internet whose obsession belonged to them rather than me. But this person knew me. They knew the texture of my actual life. And suddenly the threat was not somewhere “out there”. It had crossed the threshold. I don’t think I have fully reconciled what that did to my understanding of safety.

There is a particular wound created when somebody with proximity to you chooses surveillance over relationship. It makes you reconsider not simply that person, but the assumptions through which you have organised your world. Who knows where I am? Who wants to harm me? Who knows where my children are? Who has access to me? What have I mistaken for intimacy? What does it mean to be safe when proximity itself cannot be relied upon as evidence of care?

I could make decisions about my own exposure.

What became unbearable was the possibility that I was making those decisions for my children too.

There is a version of leadership culture that would frame this as the difficult balance between motherhood and vocation. I think that framing is insufficient. This was not about balancing school runs against meetings or deciding how much travel was manageable.

It was about whether the consequences of my public life were being transferred to people who had never consented to carry them.

That is a different moral question. At some point, it no longer felt safe for my children to remain proximate to the work. Please understand how painful that is, as someone raised in and advocating for deep intergenerational community work. Someone who knows intimately and believes fiercely in the power of the “village” could no longer discern the authenticity of the relationships around her.

And so I began to reorganise my life, relying on compartmentalisation. There was the work and there was home. The public person and the private person. The rooms where difficult things were discussed and the rooms in which my children could simply be children.

But eventually alongside the logistical nightmare, those compartments stopped providing the protection I imagined they did. There is a language of “bringing your whole self” that has become popular in progressive organisations and leadership spaces. It tends to describe integration as liberation: we should not have to fracture ourselves in order to participate in public life.

My experience has been more complicated. Sometimes the walls between worlds disappear because keeping them separate has become impossible. Sometimes integration is not freedom. have not reconciled this in my spirit yet. Because I want my children to understand what I believe. I want them to know that the world is made by people and therefore can be remade by people. I want them to experience collective life, organising, imagination, culture and the possibility of building things together. I do not want them to inherit my fear, but I also know that pretending there is nothing to fear does not keep them safe. This is the contradiction I still live inside.

As I’m typing this, I feel my heartbreaking. I’ll take this as my sign to end this here and get to Part II when the heaviness subsides. Take care.

Rest in peace and power Jason Arday. You are not your profession, a story or a headline, but a man who deserved to live a full, joyous and dignified life. In our grief, we have gained a loving ancestor. May your spirit know ease.

*This piece offered preceded the racist hounding of Professor Jason Arday. Its parallels are devastating.

Perhaps this is an odd way to begin this offering. My work, after all, is rooted in hope and imagination. I spend much of my time inviting people to think beyond the limits of what exists; to imagine neighbourhoods and communities differently; to believe that culture can change the material conditions of a place; to make the case that buildings, land, archives, gardens, infrastructures, spaces of connection and hospitality can become the foundations of more just futures.

People often assume that if you spend your life in the practice of creating possibility, hope must come naturally. It doesn’t.

There are days when the sheer accumulation of events feels overwhelming. Another genocide. Another fuel “shortage” induced energy price hike. Another news story about a child mental health epidemic. Another council declares effective bankruptcy. Another youth service disappears. Another library closes. Another community asset is sold to the highest bidder. Another fascist march taking over our public realm. Another planning decision appears to privilege extraction over belonging. Another teenager stabbed in the afternoon. Another family is quietly evicted out of the neighbourhood they’ve lived in for generations. Another heatwave. Another flood reminds us that the climate crisis isn’t on the way, but already rearranging the conditions of everyday life.

Elsewhere, wealth continues to accumulate in fewer hands while the institutions many of us rely upon become increasingly fragile. Public trust has been steadily eroded. Political discourse has become performative. Social media rewards certainty over curiosity and outrage over organisation. It often feels as though we are living through the slow unravelling of the infrastructures that held public life together. When viewed from a distance, it's difficult not to conclude that we're watching the foundations of civic life give way.

When I consume this moment primarily through headlines, my field of vision narrows. Everything appears to be in retreat. Politics becomes something performed elsewhere, by people with titles, mandates and microphones. Agency begins to feel scarce. The future feels like something happening to us rather than something that might still be shaped by us.

Despair is an easy place to arrive.

A few years ago, I was speaking with a dear friend of mine. Actually, I was so broken, exhausted and damn near defeated, my friend found me teary eyed in the corner of a coffee shop, and sat with me for hours. I confided in him that I felt hopeless. He paused for a moment before saying something I’ve carried with me ever since.

“When hope wavers, that’s when faith kicks in.”

I haven’t been able to let this go.

Hope, I’ve realised, is often responsive to circumstances. It rises and falls with the news cycle. With election results. With funding decisions. With planning meetings. With personal energy. With the inevitable heartbreak that is part of our movements. With whether, on any given day, the world appears to be moving towards justice or away from it.

Faith seems to operate differently. Faith isn’t the absence of uncertainty. Nor is it optimism. Faith is what remains after certainty has gone. We walk by faith, not by sight. In the surrender of the ‘knowing’, faith doesn’t rely on guarantees or surety. But critically, faith unaccompanied with action is dead. Faith requires practice. Devotion.

I’ve been sitting with this question of what keeps me faithful in these devastating times…

My faith comes from proximity. The closer I am to people building life-affirming things, spaces, practices, infrastructures together, the less convincing despair becomes. Not because the crises disappear. They don’t. Nor because the people I spend time with devoting themselves to radical futures underestimate the scale of what we’re facing. If anything, the opposite is true. Many understand it more intimately than anyone. They are often the people responding directly and propositionally to the consequences of disinvestment, displacement, racial capitalism, climate instability and institutional failure. But they have reached a different conclusion. Instead of accepting these conditions as inevitable, they have begun treating them as design problems, which pose expansive questions.

• How should land be held?

• Who should benefit from development?

• What would an economy organised around care actually require?

• How do we create institutions that people can inherit and steward in a life-affirming way?

• What forms of governance produce trust rather than compliance?

• How might planning become an act of relationship rather than extraction?

• How do you navigate stewardship conditions building for generations to come?

Across the country, people are attempting to respond to questions like these. I’ve found myself wondering whether we’re living through the end of one era and the beginning of another. For much of the last century, “progressive” and neoliberal politics has often been organised around asking. Asking governments to intervene. Asking institutions to change. Asking developers to behave differently. Asking philanthropy to redistribute. Asking those with power to make better decisions on behalf of everyone else.

Those struggles have mattered — and they continue to matter. Rights have been won because people organised, demanded and refused injustice. But I wonder whether something else is and necessarily must be quietly emerging alongside them. The era of asking for better systems is giving way to the era of building them. As more and more people have looked honestly at the infrastructures we’ve inherited, many are reaching the same critical conclusion: they are no longer capable of producing the futures we need. That is the context for this moment.

Across the country, we have watched local authorities collapse financially, public assets sold off, neighbourhood lifelines and lighthouses stripped. We’ve watched trust in politics erode, while wealth has continued to concentrate and communities have been extracted from, displaced and systemically neglected. We’ve watched climate instability expose just how fragile our systems really are.

In the decline of our civic and social infrastructure, we've lost so much more than buildings. We've lost some of the infrastructures through which collective power was learned, rehearsed and sustained. The question before us is no longer how we defend what remains, but whether we can collectively build the institutions, relationships and infrastructures this moment now demands.

In neighbourhoods, towns and cities throughout the UK, people are developing their own community anchors together. They’re taking land into community stewardship, opening food projects, developing neighbourhood institutions, building cultural spaces and creating new models of community wealth. Folks are experimenting with collective ownership, young people in leadership, intergenerational stewardship and forms of governance that ask not simply how value is created, but how it is held, circulated and moved, while sharing stories about the power and possibilities this opens up.

What strikes me isn’t simply what people are building, but what happens to the people doing the building. Theatre taught me this first and deeply — participation changes us. We cannot bypass proximity, but must lean in.

There’s no organising around a community building without seeing your neighbours and community differently. You can’t steward a garden without paying closer attention to the seasons. Or co-design a food project without developing a different relationship to land. Or collectively reclaim a street without thinking differently about value. There is no building an infrastructure together without discovering capacities in one another that neither the market nor the state had recognised.

Participation produces a different kind of knowledge that can’t be acquired second-hand. Only lived. Participation generates collective agency. Perhaps this is why despair is so often accompanied by distance — from one another, from place, from the practical work of making life. When we become spectators to history, despair begins to feel inevitable. Participation interrupts that. It reminds us that history has always been made by ordinary people deciding to act together.

Beloveds, I want to share just some of the things that have been keeping me faithful recently. I've spent the last decade travelling between places and being in kinship with others where folks are refusing to wait for someone else to determine their community’s futures. Instead, they are building tangible, propositional infrastructures.

I think about Buy Back Brixton: a campaign that refuses the idea that markets are merely commercial assets. It understands markets are repositories of culture. Of migration. Of memory. Of livelihood. Of everyday encounter. And so buying the market back is less a property transaction, so much that it is a community refusing to allow the value it created to be extracted without its consent.

I think about SAWN building permanent infrastructure for Black African women in Greater Manchester. How radical it is to insist upon permanence in a sector that has become addicted to pilots, to projects, temporary funding and emergency response.

I think about the work we’re doing at Hood Futures Studio, and our acquisition of the site for ABUELOS allows for us to build a permanent site of sanctuary; a site of radical culture, radical hospitality and radical imagination. For us,

Permanent infrastructure says our lives deserve infrastructures that are built to last, where our futures should not be organised around precarity.

I think about Civic Square, our neighbours across the courtyard are reimagining the “town hall” into an infrastructure creating access for local people to be at the forefront of their own social, ecological, economic and climate transition. As part of the development, they turned their planning application - when planning remains one of the most contested, bureaucratic and politically charged spaces in public life - into a love letter.

I think about Tipping Point East, and how three organisations come together to develop a circular construction hub, and from interdependent/generatively divergent practices, bring together material reuse, low-carbon construction, training and cultural activity to support a just transition in the built environment.

I think about Peopledem Collective. And East Marsh United. And Granville Community Kitchen and Farm. And Moseley Road Baths. And Legacy WM. And Portland Inn Project. And Govanhill Baths. And Hastings Commons. And the countless others I could name across the UK (even this is a blessing).

Collective power is not only measured by what we build, but by what becomes imaginable within the process and after we have built together.

This is what ABUELOS is teaching me. People often ask whether we’re building a hotel. Or an archive. Or a community space. Or a cultural centre. The answer is yes. But those things have never really been the full point.

The point is what happens when hundreds of people begin imagining, designing, generatively debating over, shaping and stewarding a future together. The point is what happens when young people sit around a table and realise they are not simply being consulted about the future of their neighbourhood. They are helping author it. The point is when hospitality becomes a vehicle for community wealths, whereby my definition pertains to the health, thrivance, capacities and dignity of a people. When a building becomes the material expression of relationships that already existed, but needed somewhere to gather. ABUELOS is collective power made durable, regenerative and continuous.

What if the opposite of despair is collective action? Despair is profoundly individualising. It convinces us that we are alone with problems that are structural. It narrows our field of vision until the only agency we can recognise is our own — and compared to the scale of climate breakdown, racial capitalism or democratic decline, individual agency feels vanishingly small.

One of the great achievements of our current political moment has been to convince us that power is something possessed by other people. Governments. Corporations. Developers. Billionaires. And while there is an extractive kind of power that is not to be dismissed, history shows us the power of ordinary people. Every right we hold today was won through collective power. Every public institution worth defending was imagined by ordinary people before it became inevitable. Every movement that has reshaped society began with people discovering that together they could do what none of them could have done alone.

Participation isn’t valuable just because it makes us feel included — inclusion on its own does very little structurally — but because it generates collective power. Proximity changes what becomes possible; what a group become capable of together. And once you’ve experienced collective power — once you’ve watched neighbours buy a building to transform into a community safe house, or traders organise to reclaim a market, or Black women establish permanent infrastructures of care, or a community write itself back into the future of a place — it becomes much harder to believe the story that ordinary people are powerless.

My faith is deeply rooted. Even as my hope waivers, faith, proximity and collective action grant me the bandwidth to keep going. So this is my invitation to you, wherever this may land. Get proximate. Don’t despair, participate.

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Photo credit: Angela Grabowska (2026) ‘What We’re Building’ — a collaboration between Civic Square, Hood Futures Studio and Footwork Trust’. Image courtesy of Civic Square.

At the centre of this production sits capital: not simply as money, but as a set of logics, instruments, and permissions that organise the world. Capital determines what can be built, what must be sacrificed, and what remains unthinkable.

Sometimes in community organising spaces, as those most proximate to the impacts of systemic breakdown, we have the tendency to diagnose the issue as “we just need more money.” But I would make the case that we need to transform the logics through which money operates altogether.

Capital is not scarce. It moves. Continuously, globally, at scale. But it is moving through architectures that:

• extract rather than regenerate

• concentrate rather than distribute

• abstract rather than relate

What we are witnessing is not a lack of capital, but a structural misalignment between capital flows and the futures we need.

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The Historical Logics of Capital

Any attempt to redesign finance must begin with an honest accounting of what it has been.

Modern financial systems did not emerge as neutral tools for exchange. They were forged through specific historical processes — ones that required the large-scale reorganisation of land, labour and life itself. Colonial expansion was not just territorial; it was financial. It demanded new instruments to extract value across distance, to catalogue and price human beings as assets, to convert land into property, and to stabilise profit through violence and law.

What we now recognise as financial infrastructure — credit, debt, insurance, investment — was shaped within these conditions, as mechanisms to manage and extend extraction.

Take land. The enclosure of common land across Europe did more than privatise space. It transformed relationships. Land ceased to be held in common and became an asset class: something that could be owned, leveraged and speculated upon. This shift established a foundational principle of modern finance: that value could be detached from collective life and concentrated through ownership.

Or consider the transatlantic slave trade. Here, financialisation reached its most brutal of articulations. Human beings were reduced to units of capital, insured against loss, leveraged for credit, and circulated within global markets. Risk wasn’t eliminated, but redistributed, priced, and made profitable. The afterlives of this logic remain visible in contemporary systems that continue to displace risk onto those with the least power to absorb it.

These are precedents. They establish a pattern in which capital accumulates through the extraction of value from bodies, land, and communities, while insulating those who control it from the consequences of that extraction.

Cedric Robinson’s articulation of racial capitalism is critical here. Capital does not operate in spite of racial hierarchy; it is structured through it. Difference is not incidental — its instrumentalised. Entire populations are rendered more exploitable, more disposable, more exposed to risk, in order to sustain accumulation elsewhere.

And these logics have simply iterated and refined over time.

In contemporary finance, extraction is often less visible, but no less present. It appears in housing markets where homes are treated as speculative assets rather than places to live. It appears in global supply chains where labour is distanced from consumption, and accountability is diffused. It appears in debt systems that bind individuals, organisations, and entire nations into cycles of obligation that benefit creditors over communities.

What changes is the form. What persists is the logic. Risk continues to be externalised. Value continues to be narrowed. Ownership continues to confer power over those without it. And so when we speak about transforming finance, we are not starting from a neutral baseline. We are working within a system that has been historically calibrated to extract, concentrate, hoard and protect. To intervene meaningfully requires more than ethical intention. It necessitates a willingness to confront — and reconfigure — the very logics through which capital has been made to function.

Finance: A Site of Struggle?

Across contemporary critiques, there is a shared recognition that the current system depends on dividing what is, in reality, interconnected.

Economy is separated from ecology. Finance from community. Wealth from responsibility. Decision-making from lived experience.

These separations allow complex, relational realities to be reduced to discrete units that can be measured, managed, and governed. They produce a world in which responsibility can be displaced, where harm can be obscured, and where accountability can be deferred. There’s violence in such a fragmentation, because we aren’t in isolated crises — they’re entangled. Housing insecurity is inseparable from financial speculation. Ecological breakdown is inseparable from extractive investment. Cultural erosion is inseparable from the commodification of meaning. When systems insist on treating these as separate domains, they do more than misdiagnose the problem. They reproduce it.

If separation is a governing logic, then finance is one of its primary instruments. Which means finance cannot remain an unquestioned backend function — quietly enabling work defined elsewhere, appearing technical, neutral, or inevitable. It must be understood as a site of struggle. Materially. Because finance is one of the primary ways in which power is organised in contemporary society. It determines not only where resources go, but what counts as a resource in the first place. It authorises certain futures while foreclosing others, often long before those futures can be named.

This is why Dark Matter Labs’ critique is so incisive. They illuminate that the dominance of financial capital has not simply skewed allocation, it has reduced the field of value itself, collapsing multiple forms of capital (social, ecological, civic, cultural) into a single, dominant metric. What cannot be translated into financial return becomes marginal, and what cannot be measured becomes invisible.

Finance, in this sense, is not just distributing inequality. It’s producing the conditions under which inequality appears rational. Through pricing, through risk modelling, through return expectations, entire ways of living are rendered either investable or expendable.

To engage finance as a site of struggle, then, is to refuse its claim to neutrality; to recognise that:

• risk is politically assigned, not naturally occurring

• return is socially constructed, not objectively determined

• and value is governed, not discovered

This shifts the work. From asking how to access capital, to asking: Who gets to define what capital is for? What is capital in service of liveable, thriving futures? What mechanisms enable that?

From seeking inclusion within existing financial systems, to interrogating the terms and terrain on which inclusion is offered. From compliance with financial norms, to contestation of the logics that produce them, followed by the design of new mechanisms and the development of new lexicon and forms of storytelling in alignment with our expanded values system.

This position destabilises the technical authority of finance — its claim to expertise, its language of inevitability, its insulation from critique. But without this destabilisation, transformation remains superficial.

Finance will continue to absorb critique without changing its underlying structure —adapting just enough to maintain legitimacy, while preserving the logics that reproduce harm. To treat finance as a site of struggle is to refuse that absorption and insist that financial systems are not fixed. They’re designed. And what has been designed can be redesigned.

Wealth in Transition

The dominant framing of wealth is one of stability — that it is something to be accumulated, protected, grown and passed on. It is insulated from volatility, buffered through institutions and secured through legal and financial instruments designed to preserve its continuity.

But this framing is increasingly untenable, because it assumes that wealth can remain intact within systems that are themselves in crisis.

The work emerging from Culture Hack disrupts this assumption by reframing wealth as a territory of transition, a conceptual and political shift. To understand wealth as a territory is to recognise that it is contested space, shaped by history, structured by power and open to reconfiguration. It must be moved through. Worked on. Transformed.

This reframing places a different demand on those who hold wealth. Not simply to redistribute a portion of it, but to participate in its transformation. To recognise that wealth, as currently constituted, is entangled in systems of extraction and that preserving it in its existing form may actively undermine the futures it is being asked to support.

This is a shift from preservation to participation. From control to uncertainty. From ownership to stewardship.

It requires wealth holders to engage not as distant benefactors, but as actors within a process of systemic change — one that may alter the very conditions that allowed that wealth to accumulate.

In the UK, there are a very small number of philanthropic entities who have made commitments or gestures in alignment with this shift, including Blagrave Trust and Lankelly Chase. Not simply as an act of redistribution, but as an acknowledgement that holding wealth within existing institutional forms can reproduce the separations and power dynamics that sustain injustice.

So what must wealth become in order to be aligned with the futures we need? Can wealth be circulated rather than preserved? Governed collectively rather than privately controlled? Deployed in ways that prioritise regeneration over return?

Of course, this introduces new considerations. Transition is not predictable. It can’t be fully modelled or controlled. And yet, this is precisely the condition we are in. We’re not transitioning from stability to stability, but through uncertainty.

The question is whether wealth will remain insulated from that process — “preserved” while systems collapse around it — or whether it will be mobilised as part of the transition itself. A reframing of risk is key here. What is the cost of continuity? Of doing nothing? What happens when — in severe crisis — money becomes obsolete?

Philanthropy, in its dominant form, sits within this contradiction, redistributing fractional resources generated through violent and extractive systems, often without challenging those systems at their root. It offers support while maintaining control. It enables change while preserving the conditions that make intervention necessary. Philanthropy is structured around distance — between those who hold capital and those who are affected by how it is used. That distance is maintained through governance, through pace, through contracting, through the conditions attached to funding.

Efforts to shift this — toward trust-based or participatory models — are important. But they remain partial unless they address the deeper question: What would it mean not simply to redistribute capital, but to relinquish control over it? To move from funding to transfer. From oversight to shared governance. From institutional preservation to systemic transformation.

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Practicing Otherwise

If philanthropy has been oriented toward managing crisis, then the work ahead requires a different orientation. It requires infrastructure and sustained investment in futures that cannot yet be fully articulated. This presents a challenge to existing financial systems, which are structured around proof, predictability, and risk mitigation. Transformative futures cannot meet these conditions. They cannot be evidenced in advance. They cannot guarantee return. They cannot conform to existing metrics.

And yet they are necessary.

If the preceding sections map the limits of existing financial systems, then the question that follows is unavoidable: What does it mean to practise otherwise — within these constraints, but not determined by them? Critique alone is insufficient. If finance is a site of struggle, then it must also be a site of construction.

Organisations — orienting towards more liberatory horizons, enmeshed in the inherent contradiction of it all — therefore represent how to organise resources at scale critical for transformation.

Across a range of practices — often small, often under-resourced, often operating at the edges of legibility — we can begin to see the contours of different financial logics emerging. Not fully formed systems, but prototypes. Fragments. Early infrastructures of another way of organising value and resource.

In Graff, a project developed through MAIA, we brought artists into direct engagement with financial language itself. Here, accounting was not treated as neutral or technical. It was approached as a cultural form, something constructed, aesthetic, and therefore open to reimagination. Through artistic practice, the logics of financial reporting, valuation, and measurement were exposed, disrupted, and reconfigured. What counts as value? Who decides? What is made visible, and what is systematically excluded?

By rendering these questions material, Graff did not simply critique finance. It destabilised its authority, in turn opening space for alternative languages of value to emerge — languages capable of holding cultural, social and relational forms of wealth that are otherwise flattened or erased within conventional accounting frameworks.

If language shapes instruments, and instruments shape flows, then this work is not symbolic, but infrastructural.

At Civic Square, the call in Endowing the Future reframes the very notion of an endowment. Rather than a static financial reserve, held at a distance and governed abstractly, endowment becomes something living: place-based, collectively held, and oriented toward intergenerational repair. It is not simply a pool of capital, but a commitment — embedded in relationship, accountable to community, and designed to endure beyond the cycles of funding that typically constrain social infrastructure.

This shift is subtle, but profound, moving endowments from preservation to participation. From safeguarding wealth to actively organising it in service of a future that is still being made. And that’s what we’re trying to build across a spectrum of organisations I’m working in.

Through Hood Futures Studio, we note that one of the defining features of contemporary finance is that decision-making power is concentrated and distant. Those most affected by how resources are allocated are rarely those who determine their movement. Hood Futures Studio seeks to disrupt this. Drawing inspiration from Coffee Afrik’s participatory grant-making work, we’re creating a pathway that brings young people into direct engagement with financial decision-making.

Rather than teaching financial literacy in the conventional sense, this is about redistributing authority. Governance. About creating conditions in which young people can engage finance as a system to be shaped, questioned, and redesigned—rather than a structure they must simply navigate.

In doing so, it begins to address one of the core separations identified earlier: the distance between capital and those it impacts.

Illuminating that finance is not only a technical domain, but a civic one. And that participation in its governance — via a multitude of forms — is a necessary condition for any meaningful transformation.

Alongside this, there are emerging attempts to reimagine financial structures themselves.

16Ventures—still in formation—represents one such attempt. Rather than replicating the traditional endowment model, it seeks to explore what a multi-capital community-powered investment structure might look like: one that is rooted in place, governed relationally and oriented toward long-term regeneration rather than extraction. It draws from existing experiments in place-based investment — models that align capital with specific geographies, communities, and cultural contexts, while asking how governance, ownership, and return might be reorganised in more collective terms.

Crucial to transition is the capacity to develop new financial forms — ones that are capable of holding the complexity, interdependence, and long-term horizons that the current system cannot accommodate.

Taken together, these practices offer glimpses into a more regenerative path ahead, connected by a shared impulse to intervene in finance not only at the level of distribution, but at the level of design, craft and authorship.

To question not just where money goes, but how value is defined, how decisions are made, and how accountability is structured, they operate across different layers:

• language

• governance

• form

• and financial infrastructure

And in doing so, they begin to sketch the outline of a different relationship between capital and community, one in which finance is not external to social life, but embedded within it: co-created and regenerative.

These are early movements. Partial, fragile, and often operating without the resources afforded to the systems they seek to transform. But they matter. Because they demonstrate that finance is not fixed. That its logics can be unsettled. And that, even within the constraints of the present, it is possible to begin organising capital otherwise.

We are not being asked to improve finance, but to reimagine it.

To recognise capital as political.
To engage finance as infrastructure.
To organise resources in alignment with values that exceed the monetary.

This work is already underway. But it is not yet operating at the scale required. And there is a gap — quiet, but significant — between those who understand the depth of the problem, and those with the technical and institutional capacity to intervene in it.

This work requires people who understand finance not only as a discipline, but as a design space. Those who have moved through its institutions — who understand its logics, its constraints, its languages — but who are no longer convinced by them. People who can hold governance and imagination at the same time. Who can work with capital without being captured by it. Who understand that spreadsheets, models, and structures are not neutral — but are sites where futures are either constrained or made possible.

The future we need will require new financial mechanics, new governance structures, new ways of organising capital in relation to community, place and long-term repair. These forms need to be built.

Carefully. Collectively. With rigour.

And with people who are willing to work at the edge of what finance has been —toward what it might become.

If you resonate with this, have felt the constraints of using your skills in existing financial systems, if you recognise that finance is a critical tool for change, seek to move from critique to construction and want to apply that to what we’re building at Hood Futures Studio, drop me a message: amahra@hoodfutures.studio

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Title image: ‘ABUELOS - Climate Justice’ from a triptych by beloved Sabba Khan

But the calls for transparency in the context of violent systems were not born as a generalised virtue. It was demanded — precisely, strategically — by those living within systems that concealed their violence at every layer. Where harm was bureaucratised and buried in legal language, medicine, media, deferred through policy, obscured by institutional process. Where power operated through a kind of calculated invisibility while insisting on its own legitimacy. It was a demand placed upwards.

Somewhere in the shift from demand to doctrine, it turned. Now, the expectation is ambient. Diffuse. No longer confined to institutions or systems, but settled across the social field. Organisers must explain their strategies. Leaders must narrate their thinking in real time. Communities must make their internal dynamics publicly intelligible. Even our uncertainties, our contradictions, our unfinished thoughts — these too are expected to be rendered into something shareable, something accountable, something that can be read and assessed. What began as a challenge to power has become a condition of participation within it. A directional flow shifting the current to mirror colonial patterns.

And underpinning all of this is a deeper assumption: that everything should be knowable. That relation requires access. That trust is built through exposure.

Against Legibility

Édouard Glissant pushes hard against this. His insistence of the “right to opacity” rejects the idea that one must be made transparent in order to be recognised. He insists instead on opacity, not as withdrawal or corrupt evasion, but as a right. A refusal of the demand to be fully grasped, fully translated, fully available and therefore governable.

Opacity interrupts this. It insists that relation does not require full access. That understanding is not a prerequisite for dignity. That there are ways of being, knowing, and organising that exceed what can — or should — be made visible.

Because to be made legible is never just to be understood. It is to be entered into a system of interpretation that is not of your own making. To be positioned. Reduced. Sometimes, taken. And for those whose lives have long been subject to surveillance, to documentation, to classification, to extraction, visibility arrives entangled with risk. With consequence.

Which is why other practices have always existed alongside it. Ways of moving that do not declare themselves in advance. Ways of knowing that are held in relation rather than broadcast outward. Ways of organising that depend, not on openness, but on a kind of shared, situated understanding of what can be said, and what must remain protected.

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney extend this refusal into practice. In The Undercommons, they describe forms of sociality and study that exist in excess of institutional capture—spaces of huddling, planning, improvising, and moving together that cannot be fully revealed without being compromised. The work, in these spaces, is often illegible by design. Not because it lacks rigour, but because rigour requires protection.

Katherine McKittrick reminds us that these dynamics are spatial, material, lived, not abstract. She frames Black life as always negotiating the conditions of visibility and concealment within geographies structured by surveillance, extraction and control. Visibility isn’t evenly distributed. It’s imposed.

Some are made hyper-visible as objects of scrutiny — overexposed, tracked, documented — while simultaneously denied recognition as complex, relational beings. Others retain the power to remain opaque, to move without being fully seen, to withhold without consequence. Transparency, then, is not a shared burden, but is unevenly demanded. And it is often demanded most intensely of those already navigating conditions of overexposure.

Saidiya Hartman sharpens the stakes even further. Her work on the archive reveals how visibility itself can be a site of violence. Black lives are often made legible through records of harm, through documents that catalogue suffering, extremity and dispossession. To “recover” these lives is not straightforward. To make them visible again can risk reproducing the very conditions that rendered them vulnerable in the first place. Not everything should be said. Transparency assumes that revelation is inherently reparative. Hartman reminds us that it can also be reiterative—that exposure can re-enact, rather than resolve, the violences it seeks to illuminate.

The Discipline of Opacity

What is called opacity from the outside may, from within, be discipline. A practice of discernment. A refusal to let everything be taken.

The maroon community does not publish map routes for public circulation. Marronage wasn’t just escape — it was the creation of alternative systems of governance, kinship, and knowledge beyond the plantation’s gaze. The fugitive does not offer a running commentary on escape. Fugitivity is a way of moving through the world that refuses capture, including epistemic capture.

These are practices developed from understanding the conditions of relentless pursuit, encoded and preserved over generations.

Not everything is shared—not because there is confusion, but because there is clarity about the conditions into which something is being released. Clarity about how quickly what is offered can be detached from its context, stripped of its relation, and made to circulate in ways that no longer serve the people who produced it.

To practice opacity is to make decisions, constantly, about what can travel and what must remain held.

It requires an attention to timing — when something is ready to be said, and when saying it too early would foreclose what it might become. It requires an attention to audience — not as a generic public, but as a set of relations, some of whom are equipped to receive what is being shared, and some of whom are not. It requires an attention to consequence — what happens once something leaves the space that made it possible. Relation does not equate full access.

This is stewardship. A refusal to let everything be made immediately available for consumption. A refusal to confuse access with care.

There is also labour here. The labour of holding complexity without rushing to resolution. Of allowing contradiction to sit without translating it into something externally legible. Of protecting processes that are still forming from the demand that they present themselves as complete.

In this sense, opacity is one of rigour’s conditions. Because there are forms of work —collective, emergent, unfinished — that cannot survive constant exposure; that require a certain density, a certain enclosure, in order to develop their own internal logics before being pulled into a wider field of interpretation. To disclose everything is, sometimes, to interrupt that process.

Who Benefits From Transparency?

Transparency often assumes a benign observer. It assumes that what is revealed will be held with care, interpreted in good faith, and not weaponised. But historically —particularly for Black, colonised, and marginalised communities — visibility has rarely been safe. For those whose knowledge has been stolen, surveilled, or commodified, opacity is infrastructure.

What remains? Well, we still need demands that force power to account for itself. That urgency has not disappeared. But when transparency becomes a generalised moral expectation — when it is no longer functioning as a tactic against concealment, but as a generalised expectation that disciplines those already navigating exposure. When it is applied everywhere, to everyone, without distinction, it begins to do different work, blurring the line between accountability and exposure. Between trust and access. Between openness and availability.

Total transparency serves those who require access without relationship:

• Funders who want to see inside the work without being accountable to it.

• Institutions that demand legibility in order to recognise, measure, and ultimately contain.

• Audiences accustomed to consumption, for whom process becomes product and visibility becomes intimacy.

• States whose power depends, still, on surveillance — on knowing, tracking, anticipating.

In each case, transparency extends the reach of the gaze, making it more available. More readable. More extractable. But movements, especially those working propositonally against entrenched forms of power, have never been built on full exposure. They require something else.

Strategy.
Protection.
Time.

Time to think without being watched. Time to disagree without being performed. Time for ideas to remain in formation, not yet ready to withstand the weight of public interpretation. They require the ability to hold contradiction internally, without it being immediately turned into spectacle. To work through tension without it being flattened into something consumable.

They require differentiation. Between who is witnessing and who is responsible. Between who is in relation and who is observing. Between community, ally, spectator, and those with no stake at all. So often these are conflated to the point that observer equates community, enforcing a type of nonconsensual accountability that has the scope to jeapordise our entire movements.

“Radical transparency,” when applied indiscriminately, collapses these distinctions. It blurs the line between internal process and external communication — so that everything must be said as it is happening, aligning with the immediacy of our digital era. This collapses consensual community accountability into public performance, so that responsibility is measured through visibility rather than relation.
It confuses trust with access, so that to be trusted is to be fully available. And in doing so, it erodes the very conditions that make collective work possible.

What gets lost is custodianship. An understanding that knowledge is not simply there to be shared, but to be held. That transmission is not automatic, but intentional. That context is not incidental, but essential. Some things require deep relationship before they can be meaningfully received.

Without this, everything begins to flatten. When everything is made transparent, culture becomes content. And content travels easily, detached from lineage, stripped of responsibility, severed from the conditions that gave it meaning.

This is where transparency, in its dominant form, begins to do different work than originally intended by freedom fighters.

It does not necessarily challenge power. It can flatten it — placing unequal actors on the same plane of visibility while leaving underlying structures intact. It rewards performance over practice — what can be seen over what is being built. It exposes those already navigating vulnerability, while allowing systems to remain fundamentally unchanged. It accelerates extraction, under the guise of openness.

So perhaps the task is not to abandon transparency, but to displace it from its position as an unquestioned good. To ask something more precise of ourselves.

What if, instead, we centred discernment? The practice of knowing what to share, when, and with whom. What if we understood custodianship as an ethical responsibility, not to disclose everything, but to hold knowledge in ways that do not strip it of context, of relation, of care. What if opacity was not treated as suspicion, but as infrastructure? A condition for survival. For essential strategy. For the possibility of building something more rooted.

Not everything hidden is harmful. And not everything visible is just. Our freedom fighter ancestors illuminated opacity as a condition of survival and strategy, testifying that some things must be held. Carefully. Collectively. On purpose.

Introduced in the Housing Act 1988, Section 21 allowed landlords to evict tenants without providing a reason, typically by giving two months’ notice to leave a property. Section 21 transformed the private rented sector into a space where tenants could never fully settle. Even long-term renters lived with the knowledge that their home could be taken back at almost any moment — not because of wrongdoing, but because the legal architecture of the market prioritised property rights over housing stability.

The abolition of Section 21 is widely framed as one of the most profound reforms of a generation. But in the months leading up to the change, something else is happening quietly.

People — en masse — are being pushed out of their homes before the law takes effect.

I would know. After 8 years of living in the property that my two small children and I have made into a home, I have been issued an out-of-the-blue Section 21 notice. We are being forcefully removed.

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The Paradox

From May 2026 onward, landlords will no longer be able to remove tenants using Section 21. Instead, they will need to rely on Section 8 eviction grounds, which require a specific legal justification such as:

• rent arrears

• antisocial behaviour

• breach of tenancy conditions

• the landlord wanting to sell the property

• the landlord or family moving in

In other words, landlords will need to prove a legitimate reason in court rather than simply serving notice.

The reform also introduces broader structural changes:

• rolling tenancies replacing fixed-term contracts

• limits on rent increases (once per year)

• bans on bidding wars for rentals

• a landlord ombudsman and property database

Together, these changes aim to give tenants greater security and bargaining power in a housing system that has historically favoured property owners.

But reforms like this often create transitional turbulence. And the turbulence is landing hardest on the people with the least protection.

Because the law has a fixed start date, landlords still retain the full ability to issue Section 21 notices until 30 April 2026. This has produced what housing advocates quietly describe as a “last window” effect.

A window in which landlords can still remove tenants without scrutiny or justification. Some landlords are using this moment to:

• clear properties ahead of the new rules

• raise rents by replacing existing tenants

• sell properties before regulations tighten

• exit the rental market entirely

Industry surveys already suggest many landlords are considering leaving the sector as the reforms approach.

The result is a paradox: a law designed to increase tenant security is, in the short term, creating incentives for pre-emptive displacement. In other words, the evictions are happening before the protections arrive - and the housing paradigm is far too inadequate to cope with the fallout.

Displacement Is Never Neutral

Over the past thirty years, the UK housing system has undergone a profound shift.

Social housing has been steadily dismantled. Affordablility has become a glorified branding exercise. Homeownership has become increasingly unattainable. And the private rental sector has expanded to absorb what transpires.

When eviction becomes easier in a shrinking housing market, it rarely falls evenly. Those most exposed include:

• low-income renters

• migrants and racialised tenants

• disabled tenants

• families receiving housing benefit

• single parents

• young renters in precarious employment

Yet these groups already occupy the most fragile position in Britain’s housing system. When eviction becomes easier in a system already defined by shortage and unaffordability, these are the tenants forcibly moved first. Housing scholars sometimes call this “displacement pressure” — the slow accumulation of forces that make it impossible for people to remain where they are. But what we are seeing now is something more immediate. A form of anticipatory eviction, where the law has not yet changed, but landlords are reorganising their portfolios in preparation for the world that will come after.

Private rents have risen sharply across many cities, while social housing supply continues to decline and waiting lists stretch — or are even suspended — for years.

So where are tenants receiving two-month noticed expected to go? Temporary accommodation, overcrowded family homes, sofa-surfing, or homelessness? Even temporary accommodation numbers are at record highs, housing associations are moving closer to commercialisation and as communities become separated and dispersed, where are the couches to surf?

The deeper contradiction here is structural. The Renters’ Rights Act focuses primarily on regulating behaviour inside the private rental market. But it does not fundamentally resolve the underlying imbalance between the number of people who need quality, fit-for-purpose, dignified housing and the number of such homes available to them.

England has been underbuilding affordable, quality housing for decades. Social housing stock has been shrinking since the mass sell-offs of the late twentieth century. So the private rental sector has become a kind of pressure valve — absorbing people who historically would have had access to public housing. This means reforms aimed at improving tenant rights are operating inside a system that is already under enormous strain.

If landlords leave the market in significant numbers, the risk is that the supply of rental homes shrinks further, pushing rents higher and making competition for housing even more intense. Some economists and housing groups warn exactly this outcome could occur. In that scenario, renters gain legal protections but face fewer actual homes to rent.

The Financialisation of Home

To understand why this is happening, we have to acknowledge something uncomfortable about the British housing system: homes are not primarily treated as places to live. They are treated as assets.

Over the past four decades, housing in the UK has become deeply embedded in systems of financial investment. ‘Property’ is now the largest asset class in the country, with the value of the UK housing stock exceeding £8 trillion. Buy-to-let mortgages, property speculation, and global capital flows have transformed the meaning of residential property. In this system, tenants are not simply residents. They are income streams attached to an asset.

This transformation did not happen naturally. It was built through a series of political decisions. The Right to Buy programme in the 1980s dramatically reduced the supply of public housing while transferring millions of homes into private ownership. At the same time, the Housing Act 1988 reshaped private renting by introducing assured shorthold tenancies — the legal framework that made Section 21 possible.

In the decades that followed, mortgage finance was liberalised, buy-to-let mortgages were introduced, and property investment became an increasingly central strategy for wealth accumulation. Banks, pension funds, overseas investors, and small landlords all entered the housing market not primarily to live in homes, but to extract value from them.

The result was a feedback loop: money flowed into housing because prices were rising. Prices rose because money was flowing into housing. Within this, tenants are not just residents. They are the revenue stream.

Rent becomes the mechanism through which mortgages are serviced, equity is accumulated, and portfolios grow. Homes are folded into financial calculations — yield, return, leverage — in the same way that other investment assets are.

Section 21 functioned as a key mechanism within this financialised housing model because it allowed landlords to maintain maximum flexibility over their assets.

Tenants could be removed quickly if:

• rents could be raised

• a property could be sold

• redevelopment became profitable

Removing Section 21 disrupts that logic and flexibility. And the market is responding accordingly.

A Housing Regime Transition

What makes this moment particularly unsettling is how little attention the current displacement is receiving. It’s not framed as a crisis, but as market adjustment: landlords are “repositioning.” Investors are “exiting.” The sector is “adapting.”

But from the perspective of the tenants receiving two-month notices en masse, the language of adjustment looks very different. It looks like searching for a home in a market where there are fewer properties, higher rents, higher moving costs and more competition. It looks like moving children between schools. It looks like moving further from community. It looks like quiet dispossession.

What we are witnessing is not simply a housing reform. It’s a transition between housing regimes.

For forty years, the British housing system has treated insecurity as a feature rather than a failure. The tenant who could be removed with two months’ notice was not an accident of the law — it was the law doing exactly what it was designed to do: protecting property as an asset while treating housing as a temporary arrangement.

The abolition of Section 21 signals a recognition, however belated, that this model has reached its limits. But reforming the law does not automatically repair the damage produced by the system it governed. Because the deeper crisis remains unresolved. Too many homes are treated as investment vehicles. Too few are treated as places people are meant to stay.

The real question is whether the country is prepared to confront the deeper truth the reform exposes: that a society cannot treat housing as a speculative asset for decades and then be surprised when stability becomes impossible. Until that contradiction is addressed, the quiet evictions happening now will not be an anomaly. They will simply be the system continuing to behave exactly as it was built to behave.

The real, real, real tea: the abolition of Section 21 will be described in the history books as a victory for renters. But there is a quiet cruelty of transitional justice in housing policy. A system that allowed eviction without reason for decades will end, but not before one final wave of people are pushed out under the rules that are about to disappear. By the time this shift in law comes into play, what kinds of neighbourhoods, relations, homes, and communities will still remain?

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As people were pushed off the commons and into labour markets that did not previously exist at scale, dispossession created the workforce that industrial capitalism required. Britain reorganised space in order to reorganise power. Deviation from this order equated punishment. This is why we must note the interdependence of racial justice, economic justice and prison industrial complex abolition, which, if engaging at the root, share a foundation in the fight for land and spatial justice.

Yet this territorial reordering did not stay domestic.

As land was enclosed and commoners were expelled at home, Britain was trafficking enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, extracting resources from colonised territories, forming new enclosures and consolidating plantations abroad. The same logic animated both processes: identify land and labour that can be seized, reclassify them as property, and convert life into accumulation.

The wealth produced through enslavement and colonial extraction did not hover in abstraction. It settled into British soil. It hardened into country houses, city centres, museums, banks, ports, railways, universities, endowments. Profits from racialised exploitation were secured in estates and property portfolios. Land became ledger. Landscape became evidence.

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To describe this as simply “capitalism” risks flattening what is at work. Ruth Wilson Gilmore insists that capitalism requires inequality in order to function; racism enshrines that inequality, makes it durable, makes it appear natural. She resists treating “racial capitalism” as though race were an added feature or distortion. The system does not become racial when prejudice enters it. It is structured through racial ordering from the outset. Capitalism is already racialised because it depends on structured differentiation — on determining whose lives are disposable, whose labour is super-exploitable, whose land is available for expropriation.

Group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, as she writes, is not an unfortunate byproduct. It’s how the system stabilises itself. And it’s why, here in the British Isles, we understand intimately the orchestration of class and race — and even religion — to calcify those differentiations for the sake of maintaining order is. The violence of Empire was first administered on home soil, across the complex history of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Seen from this context, the capitalist system stabilising itself isn’t an abstraction.

Enclosure did not simply produce a landless class; it rehearsed a logic and regime of dispossession that empire would expand and racialise globally. The plantation, the colony, the trafficked body — these weren’t deviations from capitalism’s core. They were central to its expansion and consolidation.

When abolition came, slave owners were compensated and the enslaved were not. Inequality was not undone. It was refinanced. Capital accumulated further in the hands of those already positioned to own land, and that ownership structured generations.

Black labour — through enslavement, trafficking, colonial extraction and later migrant rebuilding — generated immense wealth that remains spatially anchored in property and estates. The afterlife of this arrangement is visible now in who owns property, who rents indefinitely, who has access to green space, who lives within heavily polluted zones, who can secure long-term tenure, who is displaced when neighbourhoods “regenerate.” Land shapes life chances with brutal consistency.

When communities cannot access land, they cannot stabilise housing across generations. They cannot build cooperative enterprise or collective wealth building platforms at scale. They cannot anchor food systems locally. They cannot prevent wealth from being extracted through rent. Economic injustice follows spatial exclusion almost mechanically. Land is material infrastructure.

This is why a Land B(l)ack movement within a British context urgent. Shout out to our Indigenous siblings across diaspora with the original Land Back movement, fighting for land to be returned to Indigenous governance as key to reestablishing sovereignty, political agency and Earth kinship. In the United States, there is much leadership and scholarship about Black landloss since the 1900s. What we need in the UK, is a robust, organised and abundant Land Black movement, that understands the nuances of our history, experiences and entanglements with the African (inc Caribbean) diaspora.

Power is communal and community has a geography. Governance with land shapes the conditions under which culture, health, wealth and political agency can grow. Returning land to Black communities isn’t just a symbolic gesture toward the past, it is a critical reconfiguration of the future. Land in community hands changes the equation. Housing becomes co-operative and durable rather than precarious. Community land trusts would protect neighbourhoods from speculation. Food sovereignty becomes possible. Cultural spaces root rather than circulate through temporary leases. Environmental repair and climate readiness become stewardship rather than branding.

Within this frame, land return becomes legible as restoration of power — spatial, economic and political. It acknowledges that capital was generated through specific violences and that justice must be equally concrete.

Spatial justice sharpens the point. Planning systems, zoning laws, transport infrastructure, regeneration projects — these aren’t neutral administrative processes. They determine who stays, who moves and on what terms. Without spatial justice, economic justice remains unstable and untethered. Community power cannot endure on land it does not govern.

When I began developing the Black Land and Spatial Justice Fund, the language of spatial justice was not prevalent in British contexts. The Fund was catalysed to gather and redistribute resources to Black organisers and visionaries engaging land and space to build community power.

When it launched in the summer of 2020, the seismic tremors of George Floyd’s murder, combined with the COVID-19 induced loss of spatial agency meant the world was having a different conversation about public realm, health, violence and the politics of space. But, as we bared witness to what happened to Mr Floyd on US soil, Britain performed and then abstracted. Though police violence and racial terror are in no way just an American occurrence, beyond the empty symbolism of Black squares, a few more DEI hires/promotions and a couple of crisis funds, the structural changes in Britain were few and far between. Yet Britain is the birthplace of enclosure, the place where capitalism first took territorial form. To analyse racial capitalism without naming its spatial architecture felt insufficient.

We needed language that could hold land, race, property and power together. We needed analysis that understood Britain’s wealth as spatially sedimented and therefore requiring spatial repair, reclamation and reimagination. The Fund emerged from that necessity. From recognising that infrastructures of care, memory, imagination and futures require ground beneath them. From understanding that liberation cannot remain metaphorical. From insisting that repair must be rooted. Land isn’t a backdrop in that story. It is literal cornerstone. A non-negotiable. And there are people across the world doing the work that makes such a ‘repair to liberation’ pathway possible. While the fund started small to give direct to impacted organisers — originally a £10,000 crowdfund, which it surpassed in 48 hours — it’s now time for a renewed vision, that actually right-shape right-size addresses the layers of structural reimagination and financing required. Watch this space.

If enclosure helped make capitalism, then dismantling its contemporary forms — speculative property regimes, concentrated land ownership, displacement through development — must be part of how we imagine freedom.

Analysis of our economic conditions that do not engage with the politics of land and space at the root are spectacle. If capitalism requires inequality, and racism enshrines it, as Wilson-Gilmore says, then dismantling racial capitalism demands more than inclusion or performance. We are talking about a redistribution of ground. A structural transfer. We demand that land [as an asset class] — the very substrate of wealth — moves.

A Land B(l)ack movement is a confrontation with the architecture of British power, insisting that repair must be spatial. An insisting that Black community stewardship of land and the cultivation of space is a democratic necessity and the first step to our community’s self-determination. There can be no liberation from structures of oppression without these basics.

Image Credit: Illustration, Morant Bay Rebellion, Jamaica 1865 — Getty Images

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My work is to move beyond analysis, creating live demonstrators across my platforms of what this looks like in practice. If you’re an investor, in philanthropy and/or are exploring mission-aligned endowments with an interest in the themes of race, place, power and community, there’s a whole bunch of us ready to talk with - lets chat.

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In 2023, at my then-organisation MAIA, we set out to reimagine accounting — beyond its confinement as a due diligence exercise — into a practice in deeper alignment with our values, principles, and what we actually wanted to be effective in.

Our process began with a provocation:

What is accounting in the Black imagination?

This question was intentionally as technical as it was cultural. Spiritual. A question about value, but also about soul.

Why Accounting?

Accounting is a process to help businesses consolidate, track, and keep data. Cardiff University’s International Study Centre articulates one of the biggest advantages of accounting as allowing:

“businesses to keep a systematic record of their financial information. Having up to date and accurate records is crucial to running a successful business. Without this information, owners would not know whether they are making a profit.”

Traditional organisations are created around such value propositions, typically concerning profit maximisation, economic growth, or charitable objectives. Traditional structures and governance models are then designed to facilitate trickle-downconcentrations of power which sustain these objectives — yes, even the charitable ones — in which a system is dependent on somebody being at the bottom of the value chain to function.

In this context, the role of a Board or group of Trustees, for example, is to sustain the organisation by any means.

Even if this means dehumanising people.

Even if it means extracting from the Earth.

We are living in the consequences of a society engineered upon such a violent hierarchy.

And within this context, accounting makes no room for the multiple ways organisations like ours want to understand value — never mind how we document or disseminate that.

At MAIA, as a group of people trying to use the tools, knowledges, resources and configurations we had to imagine and build conditions for a world towards liberation, we knew that the life-affirming systems and structures we needed were not going to emerge from these archaic conditions.

As Dark Matter Labs write:

“With these norms of governing and organising, we lose accountability to the communities we set up to serve; to the planet that we rely upon to deliver it; and to the future generations that will inherit what we create.”

Contradiction as Condition

MAIA sat within many contradictions — principally in acknowledging that a legally registered organisation is not a liberatory form, nor is it the best form to do liberation work in.

But it is a critical form. A form that can accommodate the scales of organising and resource needed for liberation movements.

Within this form arises the due diligence that comes with being legally accountable to entities that require declarations of financial information: HMRC, Companies House, the CIC regulator, funding partners.

And herein lies a central contradiction. What we are expected to count, measure, record and report often feels reductive — part of the problem, or even oppositional to the values and intentions our work is grown from.

As an organisation situated within a broader transition — conspiring for, but not yet in, a liberatory paradigm — our work at MAIA focused on designing cultural demonstrators and prototypes that made our vision tangible, tactile and interactive.

We took the same approach internally. We understood organisational design itself as culture-making. And here is what we knew:

Even fiscal accounting is storytelling.

As an organisation that tracked two data sets across two different time periods — one aligned with the seasonal rhythm we originated in, the other tracking the standardised April–April tax year — we knew that at any given moment, different spreadsheets could tell radically different stories about our financial health. And this was still only a microcosm of the story of what we were.

So if accounting is narrative — if it is fiction masquerading as fact, what are the more generative stories we want to tell about effectiveness?

Could accounting become an intentional cultural practice? Could the Black imagination offer portals into this enquiry?

From Conceptualising to Materialising

The intention began as speculation, imagining ABUELOS — the cultural infrastructure we are building, now as Hood Futures Studio — and the systems that will underpin that.

Drawing back, we sat with what it takes to hold both:

• the technical requirements of finance and compliance

  and

• the desire to transform our day-to-day into something more liberatory.

Could we grow a wider values literacy across more people? Could we align what we measure with what we care about?

As Jack Ky Tan says, “structural change requires structural tinkering.”

As much as we might need to track how much money is in the bank, we might also want to recognise the solidarity economy tangibly on a balance sheet. While it might be necessary to account for how many people came to an event, we also wanted to talk about how love was present in the room. Or how our values were alive in a budget. And sure, we could talk about carbon offsetting targets — but can we account for our commitments to the more-than-human in a way that affirms life and recognises spirit?

What are the data systems for our future infrastructures going to be modelled on?

Quipu, Braids, and Griots of Data

Exploring organisational contradiction with beloved artist extraordinaire Jack Ky Tan, he introduced me to the Quipu — a knotted tally system traditionally used by the Inca people — as an example of Indigenous accounting.

He then posed the question that changed the game:

What would accounting in the Black imagination look like?

This prompt led to me to create a research residency for myself, delving into Indigenous and diasporic accounting methods.

Seeing the ways in which the collation and sharing of data sets in our Afro-Indigenous lineages has always been a creative, cultural endeavour offered a new ancestral lens — from the forensic accounting of hieroglyphs to the subversive cartographies of African braiding techniques.

From there, I designed the outline for a six-week collaborative residency to reimagine the ancestral technology of accounting for the 21st century and took it back to MAIA. My thinking? If Black imagination presents opportunities for expansive storytelling, could we become the griots for our organisational data?

What is GRAFF?

In 2023, GRAFF was birthed. We collaborated with dear friend, educator, designer and badboy strategist André Anderson, who created the framework for GRAFF, which we defined as:

• A practice at the intersection of art, design, evaluation and accounting

• A method that encourages specificity about what we value

• A way of measuring the tangible and intangible elements of our work

• A verb still being defined by our community

As André said:

“This is more than a residency. This is the early stages of creating a new vocabulary, a whole new language.”

We began with measures across three elements:

• The Work — what we do

• The People — who does the work

• The Resources — what we need to do the work

We defined both quantitative and qualitative measures.

For example:

A tangible measure:
the number of events delivered within a year

An intangible measure:
how our work advanced the Black imagination

To co-create GRAFF as a verb, we invited four phenomenal artists into practice with us: Janet Douglas, Kassessa, Sipho Eric Ndlovu and Courtenay Welcome. Together, we designed prototype tools, games and artefacts to remember, make visible and interact with both the tangible and intangible.

These prototypes included:

• a board game to track how we advance the Black imagination

• Ababu, an African-Indigenous analogue way of valuing data

• a sensory reimagining of dice

At the end of the residency, we hosted an exhibition to share the prototypes and open up the methodology for wider community play and critique. And it has been a joy to share GRAFF in a number of spaces since, from grantmakers’ offices where staff are keen to support grantees to incorporate into their “reports”, to artist development and cultural leader programmes where we can demystify due diligence early on.

Music As Ledger

Looking back now, I can see that GRAFF was not only an organisational experiment. It was a rehearsal for my own return. At the time, I believed we were prototyping a methodology for MAIA. But beneath that, I was also searching for a way to account for my own life.

For years, my calendar was my ledger. My inbox was my evidence. My reports were my proof of effectiveness. I could tell you how many programmes we delivered.

But I could not easily talk about how my spirit was doing, the impact of isolation, the correlation between the magnitude of labour and when I was disassociating, whether the paradigm I was conspiring for externally was cohering internally

GRAFF taught me that measurement is never neutral. It is always a declaration of devotion. Whatever you account for, you are saying: this matters.

Returning to music was a calling that made sense to me. It was forensic. I began to realise that everything we were exploring through GRAFF — art as accounting, story as data, value as verb — had always existed in sound.

Music is one of the oldest data systems we have. Drum patterns carried geography. Spirituals encoded escape routes. Polyrhythms tracked ecological cycles. Call-and-response functioned as distributed governance.

In that sense, my return to music wasn't a departure from organisational design. More so, a deepening of it. Now, I make music as my accounting practice.

Each track is a ledger entry. Each project is a financial year. Each album will be a somatic audit. But instead of profit and loss, I’m accounting for alignment and drift. The BPM tells me how I am moving through time. The pulse explores my nervous system and internal coherence. Harmony reveals relational dynamics. Syncopation maps resistance. Lyrics become qualitative annotations. Instrumentation becomes ecosystem analysis. Even silence is data.

At the end of a year, instead of asking myself if I met my targets, I’m asking “did my compositions reflect the paradigm I desire to be ushering in?”

If I value slowness, does the music breathe? Is there sonic spaciousness?

If I value collaboration, are other voices, textures, instrumentations present?

If I am committed to liberation, how does it feel? What does it incite?

Music becomes my method of evaluation. It’s GRAFF internalised. The Work becomes the sound. The People become the collaborators, ancestors, listeners. The Resources become time, attention, grief, joy. The goal is not surplus accumulation. The goal is loving coherence.

Towards A Different Value System

Now I speak about accounting as authorship, continuing to be inspired by Andre Anderson.

Who authors the story of value? Who decides what is recorded? Who decides what stays, what carries over, what disappears?

At MAIA, we built prototypes inside contradiction. We rehearsed liberatory infrastructures from within the shell of the old paradigm. My own sonic practice continues that rehearsal. But here, I do not need to justify love. I do not need to translate Black imagination into extractive metrics. The ledger is mine. And yet it’s not individualistic. It remains diasporic, collective, ancestral. A sonic archive of how one body — that is the sum of many parts, lives, histories — moved through transition.

If GRAFF was an invitation for organisations to become griots of their own data, my music is my commitment to becoming a griot of my own life. I no longer see accounting as due diligence. I see it as ritual. A practice of remembering. And honouring. And loving.

And in this phase, the remembering sounds like bass. Like breath. Like harmony that doesn’t collapse under tension. Like syncopation that interrupts the expected.

This is how I now account. Not to prove profit or to satisfy compliance.

But to ensure that the world I am building externally is also being built within.

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I’m working out how I want to bring my sonic experiments into the world. In the meantime, if you are also thinking expansively and doing interesting work about value systems, accounting, reimagining data, working with impact differently, I’d love to hear about it.

Also, if you’re keen to bring this as training into your organisation, hit me up!

Title image credit: Cecilia Vicuña — Brain Forest Quipu. By Sonal Bakrania.

Young people are living inside overlapping crises — mental health, isolation, climate reality, misinformation/disinformation, and a tech environment engineered for dependency. And while this does have individualised impacts, the deeper issue isn’t that young people are “fragile” or “lost”. It’s that we’ve built a society where youth futures are managed through short-termism, surveillance and scarcity rather than structural enablers like land, governance, capability and care.

Recently, I was in a really interesting conversation held by Studio Susegad, in which young people were articulating the interdependence of their needs — that addressing material stability like genuine affordable, healthy housing need not be distinct from intangible needs, like joy, passion, mentorship. While, in isolation, these don’t address the overwhelming “pressure to change the world” (as one young person named verbatim), when stacked, they offer ways for us, across generations, to be structurally engaged in joint responsibility for the path ahead.

As someone who started out in youth work, this is a matter deeply on my heart. Thought I’d write about it…

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The Future Is Being Misdiagnosed

Young people are being asked to carry the future in a world that keeps removing the conditions that make a future possible. We talk about youth mental health, youth violence, youth disengagement, youth unemployment — as if the problem lies within young people. We talk about engagement, resilience, motivation. But what if the crisis facing young people is not a crisis of character or culture? What if it is a crisis of governance, land tenure, and our borderline absurd resourcing strategies?

The truth is: we have normalised a society where young people are over-exposed to risk and under-supported by infrastructure. And we’ve mistaken emergency response for a plan.

What young people are living through is a crisis of conditions. And conditions are infrastructural. Conditions are political. Conditions are governed. So when we say young people are in crisis, what we often mean is: young people are surviving a landscape of instability while the adults and institutions responsible for the public realm have become specialists in short-termism.

The Risks Are Political

Young people are growing up inside a convergence of pressures that are often framed as phases rather than the structural realities they are.

Mental health challenges are not emerging in a vacuum. They are forming within the context of a social world that is increasingly isolating, a housing system that makes stability feel like a luxury, education systems shaped by punishment and performance metrics, and a labour market that offers too little dignity for too much effort.

Climate anxiety isn’t simply worry about the future. It’s the rational response to watching adults govern the world like there will always be more time, more resources, more patience — while young people are expected to accept austerity as a natural law.

Misinformation and disinformation don’t just “confuse” young people. They alter the terrain of trust itself. When the public sphere is saturated with manipulation, the work of discernment becomes constant labour. And when the systems that should be trustworthy are experienced as punitive, extractive, or absent, trust becomes a scarce resource.

And tech dependency is not an individual weakness. It is the predictable outcome of environments engineered to capture attention while removing the physical, relational spaces where belonging can be practised. If you take away youth clubs, safe streets, affordable transport, stable community hubs — and then act shocked that young people live online and prioritise convenience — then young people live the inevitable manifestations of policy outcomes. This is not personal failure. Young people are not “too online”. They are under-resourced offline.

All of this is happening in a politicised landscape: rising inequality, racialised policing, immigration precarity, the shrinking of public services, and the steady privatisation of what should be held in common. Young people are being asked to develop a sense of future in a world that often refuses to offer them one.

For me, the question becomes: what does it mean to build the conditions for youth futures, rather than simply responding to youth crises?

Youth Infrastructure

What I’m calling in is a complete systemic reimagining of youth infrastructure. I’m not just talking about youth services, or youth engagement, or youth programmes. I’m talking about infrastructure - the structural life forces and the connective tissue between them.

Infrastructure is what makes life possible. It is the underlying system of support that allows people to move, to gather, to learn, to heal, to imagine, to belong. Infrastructure is what turns survival into possibility. The set of conditions necessary for youth infrastructure include:

• Land and space: permanence, access, safety, continuity

• Governance: the relational agreements, who decides, who is accountable, who holds responsibility and risk

• Capability-building: analysis, skills, creative practice, political literacy, resilience and sustained bandwidth

• Mentoring and generational transition: lineage, leadership transfer, knowledge exchange, stewardship

• Material security: housing, transport, food, income, stability

• Cultural vitality: play, joy, soul — not decoration, but method

Youth infrastructure is the capacity of a society to make youth futures possible. And if that infrastructure is weak, unstable, or absent, young people will carry the weight of systemic failure as if it is personal struggle.

Youth Workers As Infrastructure Builders

In a 2024 research collaboration with the incredible Sai Murray, we centred a provocation I return to: As we look to the scale of crises of past, present, and future — recognising the needs of our youngers — how do we best expand, scaffold, and support the world-shaping imaginations and practices of young people in our community?

That research explored the legacy and model of Voices That Shake!’s work, drew from the Radical Safeguarding practice shaped by Alex Johnston and Latifa Akay, and gathered local independent youth workers and practitioners to explore practices, barriers, and the reimagining of systems in a politicised landscape.

What surfaced more brutal than a lack of care, creativity, or commitment. It wasn’t even a lack of good practice. Youth work is being asked to operate as infrastructure, while being funded and governed like it’s temporary. The people closest to young people are being forced to do public work under private conditions: short-term contracts, precarious spaces, endless reporting, constant crisis response, and little material security. In other words, the system depends on youth workers as a stabilising force while refusing to stabilise them.

And young people feel that instability, even when they can’t name it in policy language. They experience it as another space closed, another worker gone, another programme ended, another promise that didn’t hold.

The Crisis of Governance

When I say the crisis facing young people is a crisis of governance, I don’t mean governance in the narrow sense — not only councils, policy, statutory services, or the formal structures of “decision-making”. I mean governance as an expansive body of work: the ways we relationship well together.

Governance, in this sense, is not simply what institutions do. It is what communities practise. It is the infrastructure of shared life: the agreements, responsibilities, boundaries, and accountabilities that allow people to belong to something larger than themselves without being consumed by it.

To paraphrase beloved Annette Dhami, relationshipping becomes the verb — the practice of being in right relationship. And this matters because right relationship is not sentimental. It is not a vibe. It is a method for holding collective power without collapsing under the weight of extractive hierarchies.

This is the difference between a system that asks young people to participate, and a system that actually shares power with them.

Because the truth is: many young people are not disengaged from society — they are responding to a society that has become increasingly incoherent in its relationships. Adults and institutions demand trust without offering trustworthiness. They demand respect while practising disrespect. They demand accountability while remaining unaccountable. They demand young people “use their voice” while designing environments where voice has no consequence.

In that context, governance becomes a question of legitimacy. And legitimacy isn’t created through branding, consultations, or strategies. It’s created through relational agreements that hold: agreements that are lived, revisited, repaired, and enforced not through punishment but through collective responsibility.

When governance fails, what collapses isn’t only policy. What collapses is the relational fabric young people need in order to grow. Young people are left navigating systems that are either absent, punitive, or transactional — systems that show up most clearly when something has gone wrong, and disappear when something needs to be built.

Right now, young people are governed in a particular way:

• the state shows up as enforcement (policing, exclusions, surveillance)

• and disappears as provision (space, youth workers, long-term investment)

Young people are over-governed as risk, and under-governed as citizens. when we strip governance down to enforcement, we don’t create safety — we create alienation. We create compliance at best, and disengagement at worst. We create young people who are asked to carry responsibility without ever being granted the dignity of power.

This is why governance has to be reimagined as a relational practice, not a control mechanism.

Relational agreements are key here. Because without them, collective power collapses into hierarchy, and hierarchy collapses into extraction: the same few people holding too much responsibility, too little resourcing, and no meaningful protection. In youth work this becomes painfully visible: individuals and small organisations become the containers for public crisis, holding complexity that should be distributed across a system.

But relational governance offers another possibility: collective stewardship. Beyond the illusion of “community empowerment” without resources, it’s the actual building of shared responsibility with real capacity underneath it. Governance, then, becomes a question of how we hold each other. How we practise consent, boundaries, repair. How we share resources without reproducing harm. How we make decisions in ways that don’t disappear people. How we create continuity, so trust can compound over time.

This is the governance young people are calling in: a system that is in right relationship with them; one that recognises their agency, protects their futures, and builds the conditions for them to belong without being consumed. Youth futures are built through relationship.

The Crisis of Land Tenure

The youth crisis can’t be separated from the political economy of land. Youth futures are spatial. Belonging is spatial. Safety is spatial. Culture is spatial. The ability to practise trust — to return, to be held, to become known — is spatial. And yet, in the way youth provision is currently governed, space is treated as incidental: something borrowed, temporarily accessed, intermittently available.

But space is never neutral. Space is not just a container for activity. It is an active condition of possibility.

Land tenure — the question of who owns space, who controls it, who has long-term rights to use it, and under what terms — is therefore not an administrative detail. It is a form of power. It determines what can endure, what must remain temporary, and whose futures can be planned with stability rather than improvisation.

This is why land tenure must sit at the heart of youth infrastructure. We often talk about youth work as if it is primarily relational (and it is), but relationships require continuity. And continuity requires a stable material base: somewhere to meet, somewhere to return to, somewhere that holds memory.

Across the UK, youth provision has increasingly been pushed into precarious spatial arrangements: short-term leases, “meanwhile use”, hired rooms, borrowed halls, temporary allocations. These arrangements are often framed as flexibility or innovation — but the underlying political economy is simple: public life is being de-risked for the state and re-risked onto communities.

When land and buildings are treated primarily as assets — things to be sold, leveraged, or optimised for revenue — youth provision becomes structurally vulnerable. Not because it lacks value, but because its value is not easily captured in the logics that currently govern urban development: rental yield, land value uplift, commercial return.

Youth work produces public goods: safety, belonging, capability, cultural vitality, intergenerational trust. But those goods are hard to monetise — and so, in an era where cities are increasingly shaped by assetisation, youth spaces are often first to go. And when youth spaces go, the loss is not only a building. It is the collapse of a relational ecology.

Tenure insecurity doesn’t just remove a room. It breaks the conditions that make youth work possible:

• Trust becomes harder to build when the space might disappear next month or the geographic implications change.

• Consistency becomes harder to offer when programmes must constantly relocate.

• Safeguarding becomes harder to practise when environments are improvised.

• Belonging becomes harder to sustain when young people cannot return to something stable.

• Leadership becomes harder to grow when there is no long-term base for practice and responsibility.

This is why land tenure is not separate from safeguarding, mental health, or youth violence — it is part of the infrastructural ground that shapes all of them.

The crisis of land tenure is also a crisis of time. Precarious spaces produce short horizons. Short horizons produce crisis response. Crisis response produces exhaustion. Exhaustion produces turnover. Turnover produces fragmentation. Fragmentation produces harm. This is systemic.

I know a thing or two about what this means in the ground, born and raised in the city of Birmingham, UK.

Birmingham is a city where youth provision has been insidiously stripped while private development has been prioritised in the last decade — a pattern that has sharpened in the wake of the local council’s Section 114 notice, filed in 2023. When local government enters a state of financial emergency, governance shifts from long-term stewardship to short-term survival. The city becomes governed through triage.

In triage conditions, space is treated less as social infrastructure and more as a financial instrument. Assets are evaluated for what they can generate, not what they can hold. And youth provision — which requires permanence, trust, and long horizons — is forced into a permanent state of jeopardy.

This is how youth futures become collateral.

We need to be clear about what this produces: a city where young people are asked to imagine alternative futures while being denied stable space in which to practise them. A city where “regeneration” can mean aesthetic improvement and economic uplift for some, while quietly eroding the everyday infrastructures that make life liveable for others.

And this is where the question of governance returns again — because the issue is not simply “lack of buildings”, but who land is governed for. If land is governed primarily for extraction, youth spaces will always be precarious. But if land is governed for collective life, youth spaces become foundational.

The task, then, is not only to reopen youth centres or create new programmes. It is to reimagine land tenure itself as the foundational part of youth infrastructure: to secure permanent spaces held in collective governance, protected from displacement, and resourced for long-term stewardship.

The Crisis of Resourcing (Absurd Strategies)

If governance is the question of how we relationship well together, then resourcing is one of the clearest ways we can see how relationships are being distorted. As my friend Immy Kaur says, we do not have a simple “lack of money” problem. There is more than enough. We have a problem of how money is held, how it moves, where it circulates, what it is allowed to sustain, and what it is allowed to destroy.

And nowhere is this more visible than in the grant-giving economy that now stands in for public provision.

What’s particularly absurd is that philanthropy has become a major route through which youth futures are supposedly “supported”, while the financial structures of philanthropy often remain invested in the very systems that exacerbate crisis. The industries and systems deepening extraction, accelerating climate breakdown, inflating housing costs, widening inequality.

Tiny grants are given out as standard practice, while endowments sit elsewhere: invested for growth, managed as if the primary responsibility is to preserve capital rather than preserve futures. The contradiction is brutal. It is a form of double governance: one hand funds the sticking plaster, the other hand profits from the wound. The hypocrisy is a systemic design feature, in a grant-giving economy about extractive power, but positioned like its generosity.

Small grants, short cycles, and competitive application processes don’t merely distribute resources. They distribute precarity. They turn organisations and youth workers into permanent bidders, constantly translating lived complexity into fundable language, constantly proving legitimacy to people who are structurally insulated from the consequences of withdrawal.

And then, when crisis hits — when something becomes headline-worthy — money moves chaotically. Philanthropy surges, pivots, rebrands, launches urgent calls, creates emergency funds. It behaves like crisis is an unexpected interruption, rather than the predictable outcome of decades of extraction, austerity, and abandonment.

So the “support” arrives as volatility. Absurd resourcing looks like:

• minuscule grants that cannot cover the true costs of the work

• short-term funding for long-term harm

• innovation fetishism that rewards novelty over continuity

• measurement regimes that treat relationships like outputs

• competition dressed up as opportunity, as though the wells are dry

• administrative burden disguised as accountability

• gratitude scripts that position recipients as beneficiaries of noble benefactors

And the grant itself often comes shaped like a lesson: be grateful, be legible, be exceptional, be compliant. Prove your worth in a language that flattens the work. Translate complexity into “outcomes”. Turn relationships into numbers. Make the case again, and again, and again — as though the need is surprising.

Small grants don’t just fail to meet the scale of the crisis. They also quietly reproduce hierarchy. They position recipients as grateful beneficiaries of noble benefactors, rather than as people doing essential public work that should be resourced like infrastructure. They keep organisations in a permanent posture of scarcity: always bidding, always reporting, always trying to stretch what can’t be stretched.

It’s a strange arrangement. The world is on fire and the frontline is asked to survive on scraps, while wealth is preserved elsewhere, insulated, protected, growing. Youth workers are left materially vulnerable while being expected to hold emotional and social stability for young people living under unbearable pressure. And when those workers burn out, when the programme ends, when the space closes, when the staff member disappears, young people are effectively left to it.

If we’re serious about youth infrastructure, then resourcing has to stop behaving like charity and start behaving like stewardship. Not just “more money”, but money that’s shaped properly — long-term, stabilising, capable of holding people and places in time. Money that funds the conditions: permanent space/freehold acquisition, long-horizon staffing, mentoring, generational transitions, pensions, material protection.

Young people cannot build futures inside instability. And adults cannot keep outsourcing responsibility to the frontline while keeping the real wealth untouched.

Generational Transitions

At the heart of this is a refusal to fund the future as a shared responsibility.

Because when frontline work is kept precarious, it doesn’t just create scarcity — it creates a power vacuum. It becomes impossible to build institutions that outlast individuals. Knowledge gets trapped inside a few exhausted bodies, instead of building collective capability that can be held, transferred, and governed over time.

That’s why the next move isn’t simply “more programmes”. It’s generational infrastructure: mentoring, transition, stewardship. The systems that allow power to move without collapsing into hierarchy or burnout.

Youth work and its infrastructural underpinning is actually a generational project. It’s one of the few places left where people are actively trying to practice continuity in a world that keeps breaking it. But generational continuity doesn’t happen automatically. It requires design. It requires agreement. It requires the ongoing work of relationshipping — being in right relationship, not just with young people, but with each other: across roles, across ages, across experience, across power.

And the truth is, a lot of what we currently call “support” is too thin to hold what’s actually being asked. We offer young people inspiration without infrastructure. We offer opportunity without transfer. We offer access without stewardship. Mentoring can’t just be a soft add-on or a motivational chat. It’s a political technology for building the capacity of a community to hold itself.

First: it sharpens analysis.
Young people are already reading the world. They’re already forming critique. But critique without scaffolding can become misguided, despair, cynicism, or self-blame. Mentoring becomes a way of developing the tools to name what’s happening — to understand systems, to see patterns, to understand lineage, to locate yourself in history, to distinguish personal failure from structural design.

Second: it develops practice.
Not just employability. Practice as in craft. Organising. Making. Caring. Building. The ability to turn imagination into something that can be shared, sustained, governed. The slow accumulation of skill and confidence that comes from repetition, feedback, responsibility, and being taken seriously over time.

Third: it builds capability for collective stewardship.
This is the part we almost never resource properly. Stewardship is what happens when you stop treating young people as a “group to engage” and start treating them as future holders of institutions, land, culture, and governance. It’s learning how to make decisions, hold conflict, repair harm, manage resources, share power, and stay in relationship when things get difficult. It’s the work of building collective life without recreating the very hierarchies we’re trying to escape.

And stewardship requires adults to be supported too. Because generational transition isn’t only about young people stepping up — it’s about adults being able to step back in alignment, where power is being transferred, not dumped, nor responsibility just offloaded.

Right now, too much youth work relies on a few people holding everything: the relationships, the memory, the crisis response, the safeguarding, the admin, the funding applications, the emotional labour, the cultural leadership. It’s not sustainable or equitable. A system that depends on individual heroism will always collapse.

So generational transition has to be built like infrastructure. That means time. That means stable roles. That means long horizons. That means proper resourcing for mentoring, peer learning, reflective practice, and leadership pathways that don’t treat young people like future workers for someone else’s agenda, but as future stewards of collective life.

Soul As Method

Youth futures require play, vitality, and soul — not as decoration, but as method.

Because regenerative transition demands more than technical fixes. It demands participation that is accessible. Responsibility that is distributed. Systems that people can actually stay inside without breaking.

Play and joy are not the opposite of tackling housing or building meaningful jobs. They are tactics that make participation possible. They are the way we democratise the work. They are how we keep the responsibility from becoming a burden carried by a few exhausted people at the edges of the state.

We need genuinely affordable, healthy, resilient housing.
We need jobs tied to purpose and passion that also cover material needs.
We need work that has a part to play in systems change, not just survival.
We need institutions and spaces held in common.
We need youth governance that is real power, not symbolic presence.

But we also need a culture of life inside that transition. We need the practices that make the future feel like something worth building.

I think about the work of people and organisations like: Jaden Osei Bonsu, Civic Square, Freedom & Balance, Shape Sandwell to name a few. And what we’re growing with Hood Futures Studio. Practices that are addressing challenges (be that retrofitting housing, or addressing misinformation, or increasing civic participation, or reimagining city planning), through engagement of the soul. As technical as playful. As administrative as joyful. As much about rewiring the invisibilised codes of our status quo as it is about the heartwork that expands us into our greatest becomings.

Youth Infrastructure: Minimum Viable Commitments

• Land tenure for youth spaces
  Long leases, community-protected freeholds, community ownership pathways, actually enabling asset transfer strategies, and protection from displacement.

• Youth-led governance
  Decision-making power, not consultation theatre. Accountability mechanisms that treat young people as citizens.

• Long-horizon investment
  10 year unrestricted funding commitments, as the lowest hanging fruit tactic to build continuity rather than constant reinvention.

• Mentoring and generational transition infrastructure
  Leadership pathways, stewardship training, and systems that support succession without collapse.

• Capability-building as core investment
  Political education, creative practice, systems literacy, organising skills — the tools of world-shaping.

• Material security for youth workers
  Fair pay, adequate pensions, wellbeing support, and long-term stability for those doing frontline public work.

• Capital investment protected from extraction
  Collective governance models that hold space and resources in common, resisting speculative development.

• Play, vitality, and soul embedded as method
  Not as an afterthought, but as the strategy that makes participation possible and transition liveable.

• Youth futures must be a cross-departmental responsibility

  Youth infrastructure cannot sit only in “youth services”. It must be treated as a whole-city responsibility spanning land, planning, transport, housing, health, culture, and economic strategy.

Here are my starting suggestions for the minimum viable commitments for abundant youth infrastructure. What would you add to the list?

I’ve used this to inform a set of policy recommendations - if you’re interested in this, or in advocating in your own work or contexts, let me know.

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Witness this moment. A story of 2026’s beginning will be characterised by the engineered and sustained violence of tyrannical political actors. This is a moment of explicit choice where decisions made by states, markets and governing institutions are resulting - directly and indirectly - in the loss of human life.

Since last summer in Britain, we have seen an intensified campaign of racialised, anti-migrant terror, vandalism and sexual violence adorned in England flags. Now, across the United States, as Homeland Security refers to “illegal aliens”, the targeted ICE raids are resulting in the kidnap of residents, the closure of schools where pupils are considered vulnerable and the murder of protesting civilians.

For those who could afford to ignore it previously, escalating anti‑migrant violence has moved from the margins, into the fabric of everyday civic life. The subjectivity of ‘migrant’ within the colonial west leads to many - regardless of their status - being criminalised, detained, displaced and killed not only through border regimes, but through solidarity, alliances, housing policy, policing, labour exploitation and the withdrawal of basic protections. What is framed as “immigration control” functions, in practice, as a system of racialised abandonment and containment.

Simultaneously, escalating geopolitical violence - from ongoing genocidal campaigns to proxy wars and militarised borders - has produced a global atmosphere of permanent emergency. We are living under conditions that increasingly resemble a slow drift toward world war, normalised through media cycles, digital infiltrations and bureaucratic distance. These violences are financed, justified and administered through the same political systems that claim to govern in the name of democracy.

At the local level, this violence takes another form. Municipal authorities, councils, and civic institutions are increasingly governed by market logics: austerity, outsourcing, asset‑stripping, and cost‑benefit calculations that treat care, culture, housing, and education as liabilities rather than public goods. The result is the devastation of local services, the erosion of communal infrastructure, and the steady dismantling of the conditions required for collective life.

These are not accidental outcomes. They are political decisions that lead to premature death. When housing is financialised, people die. When borders are militarised, people die. When care is privatised, people die.

This is the violence we are living inside.

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AT THE SCALE OF THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

The violences shaping this moment often appear distinct: escalating anti‑migrant violence, intensifying geopolitical conflict, and the hollowing‑out of local civic life through austerity and marketisation. Yet they are deeply connected. They share a common logic that life is rendered expendable when it is not profitable, strategic, or nationally legible.

What is framed as border control or legal administration is enacted through neighbourhoods: through raids on workplaces, the criminalisation of housing arrangements, the denial of healthcare, the policing of movement and the quiet terror of everyday surveillance. This violence is authorised at the level of the state, financed through federal / central government budgets and legitimised through political rhetoric - but it is lived in kitchens, schools, streets and apartment blocks.

Geopolitical violence follows a similar pattern. Wars, occupations, and genocidal campaigns are narrated as distant, strategic necessities, yet their consequences are profoundly local. They displace populations into specific cities, overload particular housing markets, reshape labour conditions, and harden racialised boundaries within urban space. Global violence doesn’t arrive as abstraction, rather as pressure, absorbed unevenly by working‑class neighbourhoods already made fragile by policy.

At the municipal level, this pressure is compounded by local authorities adopting market logics as a mode of governance. Councils and civic institutions increasingly behave like asset managers rather than stewards of collective life. Public land is sold, services are outsourced, cultural spaces are defunded, and care is reduced to what can be measured, priced, or justified. This too is violence - an administrative form that dismantles the infrastructures that allow communities to survive with dignity.

What links these forms of violence isn’t just about scale, but direction. Power flows upward - toward the state, toward capital, toward geopolitical interests - while harm is concentrated downward, in specific inner‑city, working‑class geographies. The global is administered from above, but the consequences are hyper‑local.

This is where the question of the ends emerges.

When I speak of the ends here, I speak in a British context to describe particular kinds of places: inner‑city working‑class areas where racialised, migrant and dispossessed communities through generations have been forced to absorb the fallout of decisions made elsewhere. These neighbourhoods are treated as flexible zones by city power; spaces where austerity is tested, infrastructure gets reduced, borders are enforced and changed, and abandonment becomes normalised.

Under such conditions, sovereignty of the ends becomes a necessary political stance.

If violence is produced through distant or peripheral decision‑making but is experienced locally, then power must be reorganised at the scale where life is actually being lived and navigated. That is to say if institutions repeatedly fail to protect life, communities are compelled to build their own forms of protection, provision and governance. It is this demand our uprising must centre: collective determination via self‑defence through organisation and infrastructure stewardship.

To fight for sovereignty of the ends is to insist that communities most exposed to political violence must also hold the tools to determine their futures. It is to refuse a civic order in which neighbourhoods are governed without consent, resources are extracted without return, and survival is left to chance based on access or assimilation.

Resistance cannot stop at reaction. It must move toward construction - toward the collective ownership of land, infrastructure, knowledge and decision‑making power. Resistance as proposition. Sovereignty of the ends becomes a propositional demonstration of how we resist violence that is globally organised, politically sanctioned and locally endured.

NATION BUILDING AS A CONDITION FOR LIBERATION

I grew up in a community that had a systemic analysis to describe our shared living condition. We’d talk about the perils of “Babylon”, about the violence of the “system” and how it permeates our lives and livelihoods, and about “liberation” as a political project for the prosperity of our interdependent community.

When this was part of my everyday vernacular from childhood, it might make sense that Marcus Garvey was one of the first people I studied as a teenager when thinking about how my work might be in service to the liberation movement. Garvey understood Nation Building not as a rhetorical posture, but as a generational project; one that required infrastructure, discipline, imagination and a different relationship to time. Through the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Garvey articulated one of the most ambitious mass political movements of the twentieth century, reaching millions of people racialised as Black across the Caribbean, the Americas, Europe and Africa.

I understood UNIA not simply as an organisation, but an attempt at diasporic governance. The association built newspapers, schools, factories, civic rituals, uniforms, leadership structures and international chapters that connected local Black communities to a global political vision. This was Nation Building at the scale of diaspora - a refusal of the idea that Black political life could only exist within the borders of hostile nation states.

The Black Star Line, often reduced in popular memory to a failed shipping venture to connect North America with the African continent, must be understood differently. It was an infrastructural experiment - a material attempt to create autonomous circuits of trade, movement and economic coordination, alongside a diasporic return outside white‑controlled systems. Ships were not symbols; they were technologies of sovereignty. They represented the possibility of self‑directed circulation: of goods, people and political imagination.

Crucially, these were not small or simplistic projects. They were complex, risky, and uneven, as all serious efforts at structural transformation are. Garvey was not naïve about the difficulty of Nation Building. He understood that liberation would require long arcs of transformation, including economic self‑organisation, political education, cultural coherence and the cultivation of collective confidence over generations.

This is where Garvey’s vision remains instructive. He did not imagine freedom as an event, but as a process of capacity accumulation. Nation Building, in this sense, was about preparing a people to govern themselves - materially and psychologically - even in the face of repression, sabotage and internal contradiction.

Sovereignty of the ends draws from this lesson, necessitating that the scale of our organising must match the scale of the harm we are responding to. Long‑term visions require long‑term infrastructure. Diasporic conditions require translocal coordination. And liberation demands projects that can endure failure, adapt and continue.

Garvey’s work reminds us that to build toward freedom is to accept difficulty. This needn’t be a deterrent; rather as evidence that we are engaging the problem at its true depth.

HOOD FEMINISM AND THE POLITICS OF REFUSAL

Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism is often approached as a critique of who is left out of mainstream feminist agendas. But more fundamentally, it is a challenge to how political success is defined, measured, and governed. Hood feminism does not simply ask who is represented; it asks who is held.

Kendall is explicit that liberation cannot be assessed through abstraction or symbolic alignment. As she writes, “We rarely talk about basic needs as a feminist issue. Food insecurity and access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues.” This insistence reframes the political horizon entirely. Survival is not a prerequisite for politics; it is its central concern.

When whiteness sets the frame of political struggle, success is often measured through distance from harm: rights gained, policies passed, institutions accessed. These metrics reward visibility over responsibility and inclusion over care. Kendall names this failure directly, noting that “instead of a framework that focuses on helping women get basic needs met, all too often the focus is not on survival but on increasing privilege.”

Hood feminism refuses this frame. It insists that liberation must be evaluated through the material conditions of everyday life; housing stability, food security, bodily safety, care networks, access to rest, and the capacity to survive crisis. These are not secondary concerns; they are governing indicators and offer a way we might approach indicators for the ends’ sovereignty.

Read this way, hood feminism offers a theory of governance rooted in lived consequence. Accountability is not owed upward - to donors, states, or institutions - but outward and peripherally, to the people whose lives are shaped by collective decisions. . If communities are to determine their own futures, they must also determine how power is evaluated and constrained. Sovereignty without accountability risks reproducing domination patterns. Hood feminist metrics interrupt this by grounding authority in care, survival, and continuity.

Under this framework, accountability is not primarily procedural. It is relational. Leaders are accountable because they remain embedded in the conditions they govern. Decisions are accountable because their effects are visible and felt within the community. Proximity matters. Failure is accountable because it cannot be hidden behind distance or abstraction.

Kendall warns that when disposability is normalised, it metastasises: “When some victims are seen as disposable, then eventually all victims are disposable.” Sovereignty of the ends therefore demands a civic ethic in which power is legitimate only insofar as it actively resists abandonment. In doing so, it is a rejection of structures that are unanswerable to the people who live with their consequences. In this sense, hood feminism sits alongside sovereignty of the ends as its moral and political discipline.

GIVING FORM TO DREAM WORK

Before there is infrastructure, there is dream‑work.

Dream‑work is often dismissed as utopian, woo woo, indulgent, or detached from material struggle. But for oppressed communities throughout time, dreaming has always been a survival practice; a way of sensing life beyond containment. Most of the work I’ve led over the last two decades began in dreams - no leadership manual I read in the early days considered this a rigorous tenet of organisation building, yet it is a spiritually, somatically, ecologically, materially critical component. Imagination is not escapism; it is a technology for orientation. It allows communities to feel their way toward futures that existing systems are structurally incapable of delivering.

Aisha Shillingford’s work reminds us that collective imagination is not spontaneous; it is cultivated, emerging through shared language, craft, storytelling, cultural practice, and political education. Imagination, in this sense, is social, shaped in conversation, sharpened through struggle and sustained through relationship. Without collective imagination, communities remain trapped within the horizons set by those who govern them.

Terry Marshall similarly insists that imagination is inseparable from power. To imagine otherwise is already to contest the present order - to refuse the inevitability of violence, scarcity, and abandonment. Collective imagination allows people to name what has been denied to them and to rehearse forms of life that exceed the logics of extraction and disposability.

Dream‑work, then, is a necessary precondition to and component of strategy. But dream‑work alone is not enough.

Once imagination begins to move collectively, giving form becomes a political obligation. Without form, dreams remain fragile - easily co‑opted, exhausted, or dissolved by the pressures of survival. Form is what allows imagination to endure beyond the moment of inspiration. Form is key to organisational resilience and community momentum.

Giving form to the dream means translating imagination into durable structures:

• spaces where people can gather without asking permission

• terms of space which are not vulnerable to external forces

• institutions that can hold memory and transmit knowledge

• governance processes that make collective decision‑making possible

• economic arrangements that support life rather than drain it

This is not about aesthetic ambition. It is about continuity.

Architecture, institutions, archives, land trusts, cooperatives, and cultural centres are not secondary to imagination. They are imagination infrastructure (citing Cassie Robinson) enabling durability and stabilising vision so it can be inherited, contested, reimagined, revised and carried forward.

This is where hard and soft infrastructure converge:

• Hard infrastructure: land, buildings, energy, food systems, housing

• Soft infrastructure: governance, pedagogy, cultural memory, skills transmission, care networks

When these remain outside of authentic community stewardship, imagination is contained. It must continually restart, re‑justify itself and compete for survival. When they are collectively held, imagination compounds. It can deepen rather than dissipate.

Sovereignty of the ends depends on this movement - from dream‑work to form - because liberation is not only imagined. It is built.

LAND AS THE FOUNDATION OF POWER

Across histories of dispossession, one truth repeats: land is power - because it anchors time, relation and continuity.

For many of our ancestors and predecessors, land was never a commodity in the first place. It was a relation; a living presence bound up with memory, labour, care and responsibility. To be with land was not to possess it, but to enter into reciprocal obligation: to steward, to tend, to inherit, and to be shaped by place across generations. Colonialism, enslavement, enclosure and urban clearance did not only remove people from territory; they imposed a violent rupture that transformed kinship into property and relation into asset.

To speak of land within sovereignty of the ends is therefore to speak of re‑kinning. Re‑kinning names a return, to relational ways of being with place that our communities were forced to abandon yet never fully forgot. It is a practice of re‑entering relationship with land as something we are accountable to, not simply something we control.

This re‑kinning is what makes a different relational temporality possible. When land is held in common and stewarded collectively, time stretches. Futures are no longer organised solely around extraction, displacement, or short political cycles, but around permanence, inheritance, and continuity. In this sense, land enables a form of staying that is not static but regenerative - a rootedness that allows life to deepen rather than constantly restart.

For descendants of those repeatedly displaced - across oceans, borders, estates, and neighbourhoods - the right to stay is profoundly radical. It is not merely spatial or legal. It is ontological. It is the right to root in place without being rendered disposable; to refuse removal as destiny; to choose permanence in a world that has profited from our movement, fleetingness, erasure.

Displacement has never been accidental. From colonial expropriation to urban renewal, from gentrification to hostile environment policies, removal has functioned as a core technology of power. It fragments memory, interrupts transmission, and prevents communities from accumulating institutional and civic strength across generations.

Land interrupts this cycle.

When land is collectively stewarded, it becomes the ground upon which infrastructure can endure. It allows archives to remain intact, institutions to mature, governance to be practiced over time, and knowledge to be inherited rather than continually reassembled. Here, permanence is about consistency; the ability to remain in relationship long enough for accountability, care and collective imagination to take root.

This is the work Hood Futures Studio is engaged in: securing land tenure not as an end in itself, but as the condition for re‑kinning Birmingham’s Black community with place. Establishing a base from which culture, care, governance, and economic life can be organised on community terms is an act of refusal and imagination at once - a refusal of disposability and an imaginative commitment to staying.

Land is both strategy and relation. Infrastructure and kin. It is the material basis of sovereignty and the ethical ground that disciplines it. Re‑kinning enables permanence; permanence enables inheritance; inheritance enables continuity.

Without land, infrastructure floats. With land, Nation Building roots.

WE ARE ALREADY BUILDING

The most dangerous myth of this moment is that this kind of alternative future building, or alternative nature building is premature, or it isn’t happening at all; that we must wait for permission, consensus, or stability to make a move. This is how we become stripped of our agency and the power that is inevitable with collective strategy and action.

In truth, oppressed communities have always been building, through care, culture, memory, refusal, and invention. The question is whether we will continue to do so on borrowed ground, or whether we will claim sovereignty of the ends and build as though we intend to remain.

This is not a call to optimism, but a call to rigour. Rigour of imagination. Of terms. Of form.

Sovereignty of the ends asks us to remember what has been systematically interrupted: our capacity to stay, to inherit, to govern, to imagine beyond survival.

It asks us to build with the long view; to give form to dreams, to root imagination in land, to let continuity become a political practice rather than an accident. Not as guests. Not as temporary solutions. But as people committed to remaining in relationship - with place, with one another, with future generations.

The work is already underway.
What remains is to honour it with the structures it deserves.
To build as though our dreaming matters.
To govern as though the alternative futures are preparing to meet us.

It’s true.

This piece forms part of an ongoing inquiry into the ends‑as‑method, community sovereignty, and the pedagogical and infrastructural conditions required for Black self‑determination. A forthcoming essay will explore the idea of a pedagogy of the ends more explicitly, as well as a deeper exploration into the organising work and models I’m learning and building power with. If this resonates, let me know in the comments and keep an eye out for the follow up.

Image Credit: Maurice James Jr.

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“The revolutionary struggle against a colonial, racist, hetero-patriarchal capitalism which has for centuries separated us; arranged us in structures oppositions to each other; reduced our bodies to raw resources for abuse, exploitation and manipulation; and occupied our breathing, is today the struggle for a world — no, many worlds — where we might exist and thrive as each other’s beloved.”

Cynthia Dewi Oka

The pause between years does something to my thinking. Rest loosens the edges. The constant hum of urgency quietens enough for other questions to surface — ones asking to be held, rather than solved. January brings about that kind of energy. Personally, I’m less interested in resolutions. Resolution feels inadequate to the scale of what we are living through. The crises are not seasonal. They are structural, cumulative and invasive. Given this reality, I’m curious about possibility. A sense that something might be brought into the world differently, even as the conditions we’re living in remain as complex, violent and unforgiving as ever.

I have an annual ritual. Every year — in this in-between space — I return to reading Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, the 2016 anthology co-edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens and Mai’a Williams. A book which is dedicated to “all the revolutionary mothers and all the revolutions they created, because mothering is love by any means necessary”. One of the most important interventions Revolutionary Mothering makes is refusing sentimentality. Mothering here is not softness, nor self-sacrifice, nor moral virtue. It is labour under conditions of abandonment. It is care practiced without guarantees. It is love enacted inside systems that are actively hostile to its flourishing.

This is not a book about organisations per se. And yet, it is one of the clearest texts I know on organisational development. Not the kind that optimises productivity or scales impact, but the kind that asks a more pertinent question: What are we actually responsible for when we say we are building toward liberation?

As an organisational leader, who has birthed ideas, birthed babies and is labouring towards liberation, I sit with the anthology, allowing its wisdom to guide how I’m re-entering work, leadership, relationship-ing and the long labour of futures-building. What I’m drawn to is the rejection of certainty and the welcome of orientation — how we begin, what we are willing to stay with, how we stand in the work.

Toward a Mothering Orientation for Liberation Work

Ahead of my offering this week, I wanted to share my own recommitments as orientations while I’m reflecting:

1. Orientation to Life, Not Just Survival
   Survival is not the horizon. The work is to cultivate lives worth living—inside and beyond the organisation.

2. Orientation to Interdependence
   Revolutionary mothering refuses the myth of the lone leader or the self-sufficient organisation. It teaches us to build with, not over.

3. Orientation to Repair
   Conflict is inevitable. What matters is whether repair is resourced, normalised, and led with integrity rather than shame.

4. Orientation to Time
   Development takes different kinds of time. So does trust. So does politicised education and consciousness raising. So does dreaming. Revolutionary mothering resists the violence of acceleration as well as the reductive takes around “slowing down”.

5. Orientation to Future Generations
   Not as abstract beneficiaries, but as real inheritors of the cultures we create now.

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Mothering as Action

What could this kind of revolutionary mothering as a verb, a practice, offer us in these times relating to leadership?

When mothering is understood as action rather than identity, something fundamental shifts. It stops belonging to a category of people and starts describing a kind of labour — deliberate, skilled, and often unrecognised. A practice oriented toward sustaining life where conditions make that difficult. It lives in the unseen work of holding teams together, translating conflict, anticipating needs, absorbing shock, and staying when it would be easier to withdraw. It appears wherever people take responsibility for what is fragile without demanding credit or control. Or when the perspective of leadership is decoupled solely from notions of visibility or authority and expands to account for who is doing the nurturing work that allows continuity at all.

January often brings pressure to move quickly — to set plans in motion, to demonstrate momentum, to emphasise strategy and direction. Revolutionary Mothering invites a quieter curiosity: what survival dances are already happening, and what would it mean to recognise them as central rather than peripheral to how change is made?

Birthing Futures

Birth is not spectacle. It is a threshold. A crossing to be in generative struggle through. A point of no return. Fragile, demanding, irreversible.

Portals are not destinations. They are moments of transition that change the conditions on either side of them. Once crossed, there is no going back to what was before — even if what comes next is uncertain, unfinished, or hard to name.

This understanding unsettles the dominant logic of our time. Capitalist culture encourages us to treat creation as endlessly reversible, celebrated without consequence — endless beginnings, rapid iteration, the freedom to discard what doesn’t immediately work, begin again. Creation is treated as a performance, a proof of relevance, a response to urgency. Newness is rewarded. Attachment is framed as inefficiency. Failure is something to pivot away from rather than reckon with. But birth does not obey this logic.

To bring something into the world is to enter into responsibility; to open a threshold that alters relationships, expectations and responsibilities. People are changed by passing through. Even when an initiative falters, the crossing leaves traces: new capacities, new wounds, new understandings of what is possible. There is no clean reset, no frictionless abandonment.

Birth binds. It generates obligation — not ownership, but responsibility. What is brought into the world will need tending long after the moment of arrival. It will demand time, attention, repair, and patience. It may grow in directions that were not planned or pre-envisioned.

If organisations approached creation as portal work, beginnings would slow. Discernment would matter more than novelty. The thrill of starting something new would be tempered by the weight of ongoing accountability.

For organisations, this might be a destabilising thought. It challenges cultures that prize novelty over continuity and asks what kinds of beginnings are being incentivised — and which are quietly abandoned. It invites us to consider not only what we start, but what we are prepared to stay with when beginnings lose their sexiness. Revolutionary mothering offers a way to stay with portals without trying to control what comes through them. It teaches us how to accompany emergence without domination, how to nurture without possession.

Midwifing in a Time of Excess

Alongside birth sits midwifery — the labour of attending emergence without claiming it.

Midwifery is threshold work. The task is not to push people through these crossings, but to support their capacity to move through them on their own terms — from the creator to what is being born, there is an inherent power that is recognised. The role of the midwife is not to produce outcomes our impose solutions - their task is to pay attention. They listen to bodies, rhythms, signs. They know when to intervene and when restraint is the most skilled response. Their work is intimate, embodied and deeply knowledgeable. Midwifery is preoccupied with conditions for arrival, valuing discernment over proliferation.

Midwifery invites another pace, while bearing witness to the collective intelligence in the room. Birth workers notice what is already forming and consider how that might be supported, rather than replaced, honouring continuity, depth, and protection over scale. Birth work demands presence. Not the performative presence of leadership visibility, but the grounded presence that can remain steady in the face of uncertainty. They also learn how to hold space for contradiction: fear and hope, pain and anticipation, grief and desire all coexisting. This is not about smoothing over difficulty or rushing toward reassurance. It is about building trust through attention rather than authority.

This kind of presence cannot be automated or scaled easily. It requires time, emotional literacy, and the willingness to be attentive to what others are experiencing. But it is precisely this quality of attention that allows transformation to occur without rupture becoming harm.

For organisations, such an approach requires humility. It asks leaders to release the fantasy of omniscience and to value facilitation over command. But it also opens up possibilities for more resilient, adaptive, and humane forms of organisation.

Resisting Domination and Control

Revolutionary mothering asks us to loosen our grip without withdrawing our care.

This matters because grip so often tightens in response to fear. And this makes sense, especially considering there is much to be afraid of.

The crises of the world are not abstract or distant. For many, that never was the case. But the veil is lifting in the mainstream. State violence is being named more openly. The brutality of empire and its resource grabs are harder to deny — from the ongoing genocide in Palestine, to the most recent US attack on Venezuela, to the accelerating unravelling of ecological, political and economic systems. What is done in the dark is coming to light. That is to say what many of our communities have long known is now becoming undeniable to a wider public.

In moments like this, the instinct to control intensifies. Control can feel like the only defence against chaos — the only way to hold things together when the ground is shifting. In organisational life, this often shows up as tighter decision-making, increased surveillance, faster timelines, clearer lines of authority. Grip masquerades as responsibility.

But control is not the same as care.

Control is often a conditioned response to fear — a way of narrowing the field of possibility so that uncertainty feels more manageable. It promises safety, but often delivers rigidity. It can stabilise appearances while eroding trust, creativity, and collective capacity underneath.

Loosening our grip does not mean ignoring the severity of the moment. It means recognising that fear-driven control will not carry us through what is unfolding.

This is not a time for withdrawal. Liberation-oriented organisations are needed now — visibly, courageously, in relationship. The question is how we lean in.

Leaning in through control reproduces the very logics we are trying to dismantle. It concentrates power, silences dissent, and limits the intelligence available to us at a time when we need all of it.

Leaning in through revolutionary mothering looks different. It means staying present without trying to predetermine outcomes. It means building structures that can hold fear without letting fear run the work. It means trusting collective wisdom even when it feels slower, messier, or less predictable.

This dual movement — leaning in while loosening grip — is not intuitive. It requires unlearning deeply ingrained habits shaped by crisis culture, capitalism, and colonial governance. But it is precisely what allows organisations to remain right-shaped right-sized for the bringing forth of alternative futures.

Nurturing Futures

Revolutionary mothering is futures-work; as intimate as it is infrastructural. That is to say not only relating to the care of individuals, but the cultivation of conditions in which leadership, systems, movements, and new forms of governance can emerge.

The long labour of shaping these conditions in which new ways of living, leading and governing might actually take root does not move in linear ways. It unfolds unevenly. There are periods of intensity followed by plateaus. Moments of clarity interrupted by confusion. Conflict emerges not as a sign of failure, but as evidence that something real is being tested. Repair becomes as important as momentum. There are long stretches where nothing visible seems to be happening at all.

This is difficult to tolerate in cultures trained to equate value with constant productivity. Funders ask for milestones. Boards ask for evidence. The wider world asks for proof that the work is “working.” But futures-building rarely offers clean metrics in real time. In a previous article, I wrote that what matters is not arriving quickly at coherence, but learning how to recognise coherence when it begins to emerge and how to respond to it. I find myself returning to this sentiment. Much of our impact is subterranean — happening in how people learn to stay in relationship, how they navigate disagreement, how their sense of what is possible quietly shifts.

Revolutionary mothering insists that these slow, often invisible changes matter. This matters for leadership. Leadership here is not about being able to predict the ending or to deliver certainty. It is about being willing to be shaped by the work itself. It is about staying present with friction, vulnerability, and ambiguity — and about trusting that coherence will show itself and then become undone again in time, through collective sense-making rather than unilateral proclamation.

Revolutionary mothering asks leaders to be shaped by what they are helping to build, rather than standing apart from it. And while these shifts are rarely visible in a quarterly report, they leave traces that far outlast the lifespan of any individual project or institution. They show up in the way people relate to one another after they have weathered disagreement together. They show up in cultural practices that begin to orient towards care rather than extraction. They show up in the capacity of communities to respond to crisis with cohesion rather than fracture.

Nurturing futures is not just about what organisations build, but about who they shape in the process — the relational intelligence they cultivate, the resilience they practice, and the collective imagination they sustain.

Revolutionary mothering, in this sense, offers discipline as much as care. It insists that organisations capable of holding emergence — of tolerating uncertainty, valuing process over premature coherence, and practising repair as a skill — are also organisations capable of long-arc transformation. They do not merely respond to the world as it is; they compose the conditions of what might come next.

Taken together, these threads return me to mothering not as identity or sentiment, but as practice — survival, discernment, love, futures-building labour enacted under seemingly impossible conditions. Mothering, in this sense, is how we learn to stay present at thresholds, how we decide what to bring into the world and what to protect from premature form, how we accompany emergence without domination, and how we loosen our grip when fear would have us tighten it.

As this year opens, these are the questions I find myself carrying — not to resolve, but to journey alongside for the season:

• What am I midwifing? What am I birthing?

• What would it mean to trust emergence — in people, in organisations, in movements — without withdrawing my attention or my commitment?

• How am I honouring what is already alive?

• How can I practice a life of less decompartmentalisation, where my mothering of different life forces are not in constant competition for my time or labour?

• How am I being shaped by the futures I am helping to nurture?

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I’d love to learn of what you are birthing at this time, including the questions you are journeying into the season with. Let me know…

what if the walls
have been waiting
for a different kind of touch
palms and breath
feeling for the weight of us

time does not move evenly
it pools
around some bodies
and rushes others out the door
remembering the futures
it was shaped to carry

we notice this
with our ankles
with the soft part of the spine
in the depths of dreaming
the places that hold our weight

study happens
when we refuse to turn away
when we sit close enough
to feel the question breathe
deep against the chest

what if care
is not a feeling
but a way of staying
long enough
to be transformed

names arrive
not citations
but companions
close enough to lean on
walking us back to ourselves

what if the archive
is not behind us
but beside us
asking for different questions
preparing for the yet-to-come

repair does not announce itself
it practices
again
again
again

attention becomes structure
when we give it time
to learn our rhythms
when listening has a pulse

what if imagination
is not escape
but training
for staying alive
together

what if grief is not an ending
but a tide
teaching us
how to move celestially
without disappearance

the future does not wait
it leans into the moment
we decide to listen differently.
it finds the seams
and refuses the room as it was given.

some rooms soften
when we carpenter them
with breath
with refusal
with love that does not hurry

and so we continue
without closure.
with our hands still open.
with questions warm in our palms.
with the quiet confidence
that what we are building
knows we are coming.

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I came to founding an organisation not because I wanted to leave creative practice behind, but because I could no longer accept the containment of artistic capacity within the speculative alone. Investing in the ‘organisation’ as a form to move beyond the speculative emerged in my attempt to systemically address the disparities between who has — and who does not have — access to tools, opportunities, resources, and power to change the material circumstances of their lives and places. My first organisation, MAIA, came from recognising that artists and cultural workers are not simply commentators on the world, but people with deep capacity to transform it —and that this capacity is too often suppressed, instrumentalised, or rendered symbolic. MAIA has since evolved into Hood Futures Studio as a way to meet the rhythm, practice and renewed focus that presents itself in our intention to put materials, land, space, tools and resources in community hands as a people-power approach to addressing the root causes of displacement and dispossession within our neighbourhoods and cities.

Over the last 15 years, I have set up or been a founding member of a number of organisations and businesses, but all share an origin point: I tried, consciously, to approach building an organisation as an act of world-building in the way theatre had taught me to: with attention to structure, to emergence, to collective responsibility, and to the ethics of making something together under constraint. I did not imagine this would be easy. But I underestimated how structurally difficult it would be to lead an organisation from within compounding crises — particularly as a working-class Black woman, simultaneously hyper-visible and persistently invisibilised by many of the same systems.

Leadership in this context is not abstract. It is lived in the body; shaped by exposure, by scrutiny, by exhaustion, by care, by refusal. To lead while being read as both representative and expendable is to inhabit a particular kind of contradiction — one that requires more than resilience rhetoric to survive.

At the same time, we are living through a moment in which discourse around power is shifting. There is a growing recognition and insistence on collectivising power as a way to resist the extractive, hierarchical forms that advance violence and dispossession. This shift is necessary. But it also demands nuance. “Flat” hierarchies are not inherently liberatory; they are often as ill-equipped as rigid top-down structures to deal with the complexity, accountability, and care required for life-affirming futures-building.

It is here — at the intersection of theatre-making, organisational leadership, power, and world-building — that this piece sits as a line of enquiry I’m thinking out loud about.

Uncertainty as Material, Not Failure

In devised theatre, uncertainty is not something to be overcome on the way to clarity. It is the condition of the work itself.

Devising begins without a finished script. There is no authoritative text handed down in advance, no single vision to be executed. Instead, propositions are made—gestures, fragments, images, questions—and the ensemble struggles collectively to make meaning in motion. What matters is not arriving quickly at coherence, but learning how to recognise coherence when it begins to emerge, and how to respond to it.

Clarity, in this context, is not ultimate or absolute. It is provisional. It arrives, recedes, mutates. It is something the group senses, tests, refines, and sometimes discards. Meaning is discovered through doing, not revealed from above. The power of devised theatre lies precisely here: in its ability to hold uncertainty long enough for something more honest, more complex, and more shared to take shape.

This approach produces a very particular relationship to leadership and authorship. No one person holds the truth of the work in advance. Authority circulates through attention, responsiveness, and the capacity to recognise when a proposition is alive —and when it is not. Uncertainty becomes a shared material, not a private burden or a mark of incompetence.

Civic organisations, by contrast, are often pressured to treat uncertainty as something that must be resolved quickly and decisively. Clarity is expected to be delivered, owned, and defended — often by those already carrying disproportionate responsibility. When clarity is treated as fixed and singular, it becomes extractive: decisions harden too early, dissent is framed as disruption, and learning is mistaken for failure.

Approaching leadership through the logics of devised theatre offers a different possibility. It suggests that clarity can be understood as an in-flux method — a collective practice of noticing meaning as it emerges, articulating it temporarily, and iterating from what has been learned. Here, uncertainty is not a void to be filled, but a generative field in which shared sense-making becomes possible.

The ethical question shifts. It is no longer ‘who has the answers’? But ‘how do we stay in relation long enough to recognise what the work is asking of us now’? This is where the power is — not in certainty bestowed, but in meaning made together, in motion.

If devised theatre teaches us to treat clarity as provisional and collectively made, then the question for organisations becomes what kinds of structures are required to hold emergence without foreclosing its potential.

Emergence Needs Containment

Theatre is often invoked as a space of emergence, improvisation, and freedom. But emergence in theatre is never unbounded.

It is held within frames: rehearsal schedules, defined roles (see: badass stage managers), constraints of time and budget, shared agreements about what is being made. Emergence does not replace structure — it requires it.

This is where emergent strategy becomes useful for civic world-builders, as an infrastructural orientation. Emergence is not the absence of planning. It is planning that understands itself as provisional, responsive and relational.

For organisations building social and civic infrastructure, this reframes leadership as conditions-making rather than prediction. Leaders are not omniscient architects of the future. They are dramaturgs, shaping the conditions under which something coherent and durable might emerge. The task, then, is not to script the world in advance, but to ensure the frame is strong enough to hold what arrives.

Authority, Stewardship, and the Refusal of False Horizontality

Theatre is in now way immune to abuses of power. It has long histories of charismatic domination, silencing, exploitation, and harm — often justified in the name of vision, urgency, or the work itself. To suggest otherwise would be dishonest. And yet, theatre remains a site where power is unusually exposed: where authority is exercised in real time, where its effects are felt immediately in bodies, and where failure is difficult to abstract away.

It was within an ensemble theatre company that I first encountered a seductive misunderstanding of power. As a young maker in these rhythms and rituals, I believed ensemble meant flatness — same responsibilities, equal contribution, and collective learning. I assumed everyone did a little of everything, and where skills were uneven, the group would support development collectively. It felt, at the time, like a rehearsal for another world.

Only later did I begin to see how much labour, risk, and responsibility were being invisibilised beneath that ideal. Who did the work of skills development and capacity building? What work was hidden? Who held the emotional weight when things broke down? Who absorbed conflict so that others could continue to create? Who picked up the slack when commitments faltered? Much of this labour was gendered, much of it shaped by class. What appeared as horizontality often relied on uneven distributions of care, unpaid labour, and tolerance for risk. The ensemble functioned, but not because it escaped hierarchy — but because it obscured it.

This realisation fundamentally reshaped how I understand power.

In founding MAIA, I carried a similar desire to replicate the generative intimacy of ensemble practice — to build a structure capable of rehearsing liberation. But organisational life does not end at the rehearsal room, and people do not enter it with equal risk, capacity, or protection. At MAIA, these differences were not ignored; they were central to how we tried to design collectivity. What became clear over time was the need for more nuanced ways of distributing responsibility, not just benefits — ways that did not default to the assumption that hierarchy itself is the problem, rather than how power is exercised, held, and made accountable. At Hood Futures Studio, we are building an organisational culture that recognises difference and can hold it without retreating into a politics where any form of authority is read as a personal or ethical failure, rather than as a structural question demanding authorship, care, clarity, and accountability.

Theatre, in practice, has the potential to offer a more honest model than its rhetoric sometimes suggests. It is not a horizontal field. There are directors, producers, designers, stage managers. Authority is differentiated, time-bound, and role-specific. Crucially, it exists in service of the work. When authority is exercised poorly, it is felt immediately. When responsibility is unclear, the work suffers.

This offers civic organisations a more precise language than the binary of hierarchy versus horizontality. Hierarchy is not inherently the problem. Extractive power is. Lack of accountability is. Authority divorced from stewardship is.

To lead dramaturgically is to understand authority as a form of collective care: clarity of responsibility, legibility of decision-making, and accountability to the shared world being built. Shared leadership does not mean shared everything. It means shared commitment to the work, alongside an honest reckoning with who carries what, and at what cost.

For organisations intent on futures-building from within an existing status quo, this reckoning is imperative. False horizontality does not dismantle power; it obscures it. And obscured power has a habit of reproducing the very inequalities such organisations claim to resist.

The task is not to abolish power, but to commons it — to make it legible, situated, collectively held and accountable to the mission.

Once authority is understood as a form of stewardship rather than dominion and control, the question shifts from who holds power to what that power is oriented toward.

The Need for a Shared Horizon

In theatre, everyone knows there is a show.

This does not mean consensus. People may disagree fiercely about meaning, form, politics, or method. But the horizon is clear. The show holds the work together across difference. It allows disagreement without collapse, urgency without panic, and iteration without endless drift. Crucially, it makes effectiveness legible—not only through audience response, but through what the work demands of those making it.

Civic organisations often lack this kind of shared horizon. Goals are diffuse, success is externally imposed, and effectiveness is abstracted into metrics that sit far from lived experience. People are asked to labour across competing temporalities—crisis response, maintenance, and long-term transformation—without a shared way of understanding how these relate to one another.

This is where frameworks like the Berkana Institute’s Two Loops Model or Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons (thanks Cassie Robinson) become useful as orienting lenses. Both models name a reality many organisations already inhabit but struggle to articulate: that multiple systems, logics and futures coexist at the same time.

• A dominant system in decline

• Emerging practices that do not yet have full legitimacy or support

• And the difficult, often invisible work of transition between them

What these models offer is not prediction, but orientation. They help distinguish between work that sustains the present, work that experiments with alternatives, and work that midwifes the shift between worlds.

Theatre understands this instinctively.

A rehearsal room is always operating across horizons. There is the world as it is — the constraints of budget, bodies, space, history. There is the world trying to emerge — the gestures, scenes, propositions that point toward something not yet formed. And there is the work of transition: editing, refining, letting go, making choices about what must be carried forward and what must be left behind.

The show functions as a shared horizon precisely because it allows these temporalities to coexist without confusion. Not everything needs to be resolved at once. Not every experiment is expected to scale. But everyone knows how their labour relates to the whole.

For civic organisations, a shared horizon does similar work. It does not eliminate complexity, but it organises it. It allows people to understand whether they are maintaining, disrupting, or transitioning systems, and why that matters. It gives leaders and teams a way to locate their work within longer arcs of change, without demanding premature coherence or false unity.

Approaching leadership as world-building insists on this kind of horizon. Not a single future to be delivered, but a collectively held orientation that makes different kinds of work intelligible, accountable and connected. Without it, authority fragments, emergence becomes unmoored and exhaustion proliferates.

Internal Spatial Dramaturgy

Spatial dramaturgy (which I write about here in relation to architecture and compositions of desire) asks how space shapes and is shaped by meaning, movement and relation. But organisations are not only actors in external space; they are internal architectures.

Meetings are stages. Policies are scripts. Budgets are spotlights on what we believe. Timelines are choreographies. Conflict is spatially held or displaced.

To build robust worlds externally requires internal infrastructures capable of holding contradiction, disagreement, care, and risk. This is organisational dramaturgy: the shaping of internal space so that the world being built does not collapse under its own ethical weight.

Theatre is instructive here not because it is gentle, but because it is rigorous.

Actors are not asked to simply “show up as themselves.” They train — repeatedly and collectively — to expand their capacity for attention, responsiveness, endurance, and care. Embodied learning, somatic awareness, voice and movement work — these are the means by which actors develop the robustness required to work under pressure, uncertainty, and exposure. This training builds not only expressiveness, but discernment: the ability to sense when something is alive, when it is forced, and when it must be released.

This rigour matters because fear is always present. Fear of getting it wrong. Fear of harm. Fear of visibility. Fear of consequence. In organisational life, fear has a particular immobilising power: it encourages premature clarity, defensive certainty, and the substitution of analysis for action. We tell ourselves we are waiting for the right framework, the right language, the right conditions, when often what we are seeking is permission to move.

Theatre understands something vital here: meaning is rarely discovered in advance. It emerges through doing. Rehearsal is not a space where answers are found in some linear manner and then enacted; it is where understanding is produced through movement, repetition, failure, sense-making, creation and revision. Clarity is not a prerequisite for action, but a product of sustained engagement. ‘Doing’ is the site of meaning-making.

Creative teams learn this collectively. They develop discipline not to eliminate fear, but to work alongside it. Endurance is built through shared rhythm, mutual accountability, and the willingness to stay in the work even when meaning is not yet secure. The capacity to continue without rushing to resolution or retreating into paralysis is trained.

Just as importantly, this endurance has never been sustained by individualised bravery alone. Theatre’s capacity to hold fear and risk has been underwritten by collective organising: unions, agreements, codes of practice, and accountability structures that exist precisely because power is uneven and harm is possible. These infrastructures do not abolish fear, but they prevent it from being privatised. They insist that the conditions of work are part of the work.

For civic world-builders, organisational dramaturgy asks for the same seriousness. Not performative wellness, nor the quiet individualisation of anxiety, but collective practices that build capacity over time. Who we need to be is not just a matter of intention or alignment, but of cultivation.

This means organisations must design for:

• Embodied and relational literacy, not just technical competence

• Rhythms that support endurance rather than constant urgency

• Practices that allow fear to be named without immobilisation

• Space and skill that allows conflict to be held without rupture

• Structures that make power visible, negotiable, and accountable

World-building at scale requires more than vision or critique. It requires people capable of acting without guarantees — of allowing meaning to emerge through work rather than waiting for clarity to arrive. These are trained capacities.

Internal spatial dramaturgy, or organisational dramaturgy, is not about atmosphere or vibes. It is about discipline, “a word our movements are allergic to”, to cite Zen teacher, movement strategist and writer Norma Wong. Discipline is the long, collective work of becoming robust enough to move, together, in the face of uncertainty, without reproducing the very violences we seek to undo.

The question becomes not only what are we building? but:

• Who do we need to be to build it?

• What qualities must our teams inhabit?

• What must our internal architectures make possible — and impossible?

Leadership here is compositional labour. Not the management of people, but the shaping of conditions. How we work together is not incidental to the world we are building; it is part of it.

To approach leadership as a world-building practice is not to borrow from theatre for a deferred type of inspiration, but to accept a deeper responsibility for the worlds our organisational lives already compose. It asks us to take uncertainty seriously as material, to practise authority as stewardship, to hold emergence within structures capable of care, and to recognise that clarity is not something we arrive at alone or in advance, but something we make—together—through disciplined, accountable action. In a time marked by fear, fragmentation, and the pressure to perform certainty, this approach insists on something quieter and harder: the cultivation of collective capacity to move without guarantees, to build without innocence, and to remain answerable to the futures we claim to be working toward. The work, as in theatre, is not simply to imagine another world—but to become robust enough to hold it when it begins to appear.

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Some of my previous writing provides expansion and context for this offering. Would love to be in dialogue surrounding these ideas and what it means for the cultivation of power-with:

• Spatial Dramaturgy and the Composition of Desire.

• Radical Hospitality Part III: The Alchemy of Care in Organisational Life

• The NonProfit Industrial Complex and the Gap in Alternative Future Building

Image Credit: Lanre Malaolu’s The Conversation. Courtesy of: Director’s Notes and The Uncertain Kingdom.

This matters especially in Black contexts, where systemic neglect — of people, buildings, neighbourhoods, histories — has been structured into the environment itself. This is why archiving is not simply a creative pursuit, but an infrastructural necessity. The question isn’t just who gets remembered, but what infrastructures support that remembering? How does this type of memory work support the birthing of alternative futures?

all futurists are archivists, all archivists are futurists.

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The past and future is not a binary when we recognise how people of the African diaspora have moved through time. How we move(d) to survive systems designed to make us disappear. The distinction between past and future collapses when we acknowledge the responsibility of holding together a lineage that the world has tried — structurally, somatically, legislatively, architecturally — to break apart.

Black life has always required this kind of temporal dexterity — knowing how to look backwards and forwards at once, how to carry what has been suppressed, how to build worlds and possibilities despite rupture.

African-centred methodologies have long named this temporal collapse. Like, the Akan people, who offered the Sankofa principle — often framed as “go back and fetch it”— reminding us that retrieving what has been displaced is a precondition for moving forward. Sankofa makes this temporal relationship explicit, teaching us that we must go back for what was taken, what was neglected, what was deliberately obscured — not to return to an earlier time, but to secure the materials required for building a livable future. It is a political stance as much as a cultural one. Sankofa refuses the idea that progress is forward motion detached from the past; it insists that world-building towards liberatory transformation begins with memory, repair, and continuity; that the materials of the past are the technologies of the future.

Sankofa is a principle that reveals why futurism and archiving aren’t separate practices at all. They are both strategies for interrupting dispossession — two gestures of the same movement: the return that enables the arrival.

Archiving as an Act of Care and Retrieval

When I talk about archives, I am not referring to temperature-controlled vaults, carefully sealed boxes, or the distant, clinical choreography of the heritage sector — where care often means sterility, restricted access, or objects suspended behind glass like embalmed proof of a life already complete and captive.

The archives that matter to us, the ones that hold the fullness of Black life, operate by a different logic. They require: touch, breath, tactility, conversation, mess, risk, community proximity. To speak of archiving in this spirit is to speak of a different form of care — the kind defined by labour, commitment and the refusal to let (hi)stories disappear.

Christian Cassiel’s work with Seed Archives makes this explicit: the archive is not a mausoleum but a living interface between people and their stories, their ephemera. Seed Archives’ gatherings are tactile, sensory, embodied. People hold posters, artworks, sculptures, books, sleeves, photographs in their hands. They smell the ink. They pass objects between each other. They remember aloud. They laugh. They grieve.

It is a ritual of return.

And in that return, a fundamental truth emerges: care requires contact. Feeling. Relationship.

When Black communities build archives, we are countering a long architecture of structural abandonment: the closure of schools and communal spaces, the media landscape which falsifies the details of our lives and rejects the nuances of our experience, the administered decline and demolition of our neighbourhoods, the disappearance of records, the devaluation of place-based and diasporic knowledges, the casual dismissal of everyday Black life.

Archival work becomes a way of refusing this erosion. It becomes a defense against spatial violence — a practice anchored in the belief that what we remember shapes what we can demand.

Dr. Etienne Joseph often reminds us that archival work is never neutral. It begins long before a record is catalogued or a photograph is digitised. It begins in the care that someone extends to a memory others might dismiss. Care is what interrupts erasure. Care is the counterforce. Care is what makes continuity possible.

Connie Bell deepens this understanding by grounding care in the (collective) body. She insists that memory is lived before it is stored — that people themselves are archives, and the work of repair cannot begin with the material unless it also attends to the embodied. Her work positions care as a form of infrastructural healing: the restoration of dignity where structural neglect has taken root.

Seen through Sankofa, archival care becomes a methodology of retrieval. It recognises that what we bring forward is shaped by what we choose to pick up and what knowledges we cultivate alternative futures with.

An archive is not a warehouse of the previously important; it is a continuity system, a network of relationships and responsibilities that stretch across generations. It is care applied to space-time.

Futurism as Continuity Not Escape

Our archives have always been futurist technologies. Futurism is often spoken about in speculative terms. Many Western cultural spaces often treat the past as an obstacle — something to transcend, disrupt, or leave behind. But for Black communities, futurism without memory is a form of amnesia. It risks rebuilding the same conditions of harm under the guise of innovation. Futurism without accountability, without archival consciousness and politicised memory work is aesthetics dressed as progress. In the context of Black spatial life, futurism can never be mere projection. It is continuity work. Ancestral method.

Futurism asks: what do we carry forward? What structures must be transformed? What does a world look like in which dispossession, extraction and erasure is no longer the organising principle our lives respond to? And what knowledge, strategies, and inheritances do we need to bring with us?

This is where futurism and archiving meet. Futurism is not an escape from the past; it is the stewardship of the past into new conditions. It’s how we draw from our histories to demand and bring into being futures in which our lives matter. It is our commitment to futures in which we exist in our expansiveness. It is the recognition that the infrastructures we build — cultural, spatial, economic — must be grounded in the lessons of prior harm and the wisdom embedded in collective memory.

Archival Intimacy as Space-Making

Black archival intimacy — the handling, touching, holding, feeling of our own materials — is not only about memory. It is also about space-making.

The moment someone picks up a flyer from a community rave, a photograph of Grandma pulled from the back of a drawer, or a programme from a Caribbean social club long lost to urban redevelopment, they are not simply remembering. They are re-entering spaces that have been diminished, displaced, or demolished. They are reanimating Black spatial history. They are asserting presence where planning policy attempted absence.

Place. It’s the ability to locate oneself where one belongs. Place is the manifestation of care. With location alone, you’ve got space. With location and familiarity, intention and love, you’ve got place. I think that the work that I’m involved in is constantly trying to bring intention, beauty, and love back to location.
- THEASTER GATES

This intimacy becomes a kind of spatial literacy. When a community engages in tactile archival practices, it begins to redraw the map. Black archival intimacy becomes a spatial act: a way of reclaiming streets, buildings, rooms, clubs and corners that were never formally recorded but were deeply lived. We are reoriented to the neighbourhoods, churches, clubs, social centres, and homes that have shaped Black life yet rarely appear in official records. Every object becomes a doorway. Every passing of an item is a remapping. Every shared memory redraws the boundaries of what was once a displaced or erased space through the mediums of policy, regeneration or city administration.

Cultural Memory, Black Places and Sacred Spaces

What is placemaking? It is the continual renewal of desacralized Black space into newly sacralized Black space through love and attention and community.

THEASTER GATES

Our spaces, too, are archives. Honouring the geography of cultural memory is what led me to spatial practice. In 2016, after naming the vision that came to me in my dream the year prior, ABUELOS, I remember watching a talk Theaster Gates gave. He spoke of the profound impact that deep attention and care given to unloved places makes. He spoke to what I believed — that attending to place with care is a radical intervention in a landscape defined by dispossession. And that intervention generates an abundance of value.

I set out to build community spaces in the ends that had experienced their own managed decline. The amalgamation of spaces and systems we are transforming is bringing forth a whole other geography of possibility — from the scale of the home, to the neighbourhood, to the ward, to the city. I made it my life’s work to ensure that the value created here by our collective acts of care would not not siphoned upward into institutional prestige or investor profit. It circulates back into community life. My practice insists that the aesthetic, social and spiritual value created through Black cultural work must return to the people who produce it. It must strengthen the ground beneath our feet rather than prepare it for someone else’s acquisition.

This principle resonates deeply with the broader lineage of Black space-making — including the work of Theaster Gates — which similarly demonstrates what becomes possible when we refuse the idea that places deemed “spent,” “blighted,” or “past their use” are beyond care. We know they are not. We know that care can convert neglect into possibility. We know that value emerges where attention is given, not taken.

Black archival intimacy, then, is not simply about preserving material; it is about futuring Black places. Touching the archive teaches people that their stories are not disposable — and so neither are their neighbourhoods. Their buildings are not “ruins. Their communities are not “inevitable casualties” of redevelopment. Their memories are not “insufficient evidence” of lives worth care.

Within any attempt to build and sacralize Black cultural infrastructure in these times, archive-as-care must be a guiding principle, in which we prioritise:

• maintenance over extraction

• tactility over sterility

• intergenerational memory-work over erasure

• stewardship over spectacle

• collective governance over gatekeeper authority

• community benefit over institutional prestige

• long-term stability over short-term visibility

Archive-as-care reframes cultural work from producing content to building capacity. Theaster Gates shows us that care turns neglected spaces into cultural anchors.
Dr Etienne Joseph shows us that care turns marginalised records into sources of power.
Connie Bell shows us that care turns intergenerational memory into healing.

When care becomes a methodology, it becomes a spatial design principle.
It spills outward — from the handling of objects, to the stewardship of buildings, to the cultivation of neighbourhoods, to the imagining of new sacred spaces where Black life can continue on its own terms.

In this sense, the archive is not only a container of memory but a seedbed for spatial futures — a blueprint for return, a map for belonging, a rehearsal for freedom. Archive is testimony. From the creation, collection and exchange of our histories, to the physical sites which are sanctuaries for memory, we build systems that can hold and transmit meaning into the future.

In the end, the work comes down to a fundamental reorientation of how we understand time, care, and the infrastructures that hold Black life. The archive is not behind us; it is in, around and beside us. The future is not ahead of us; it is shaped by what we carry forward with deliberate tenderness and refusal. Black place-making, Black archival intimacy, Black cultural infrastructure — all of it lives inside this same temporal loop, this Sankofa logic that insists nothing truly disappears if we tend to it properly. Which is why the boundary between the archivist and the futurist dissolves the moment we attend to what is at stake.

All futurists are archivists, because the future requires retrieval. All archivists are futurists, because preservation is an act of seeing ourselves in the yet-to-come. And both are practices of refusing erasure, insisting on continuity, and constructing the infrastructures through which Black life can thrive.

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Image credit: African Liberation Day, Handsworth Park, 1977; Vanley Burke.

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It all began as a Grand Theft Auto player, whose obsession with the game’s cartography led me to create my own cities in my Maths textbooks. After geeking out about how waste works, where cultural life occurred, how people travelled in my city, where they lived and why. I built transit routes, imagined neighbourhood dynamics, tracked the flow of energy, water, nightlife, rhythm. ULTIMATE NERD. Eventually those sketches became stories about the people who inhabited these fabricated places.

That practice — part gaming, part worldbuilding, part early urbanism — eventually converged in theatre. First through set design, and later as a performer, I found myself constantly constructing worlds: spatial narratives, atmospheres, environments that held the emotional logic of a story. But I also grew disillusioned. The worlds I longed for, the worlds I dreamt up, were always confined to the stage, the page, or the speculative. I wanted to shape the real world with the same curiosity, creativity and systems-thinking I poured into my invented ones.

So my work became an experiment: What happens when the imagination of a worldbuilder is turned toward real cities, real people and the material systems that govern our lives?

For the piece, I’ll share an expanded version of my talk at the summit, along with the seeds of policy recommendations that were sown in my conversations following.

The Politics of What Gets Built — Who Benefits?

Cities do not just emerge. Every street, tower block, “opportunity zone,” or “regeneration” district we see is the outcome of intentional choices — shaped by planning frameworks, financial instruments, political appetites and systems of ownership that long predate the communities living within them.

Conversations about development often start with who gets to develop, but we should also be asking: What gets developed? Why those things? And who ultimately benefits from the value created?

To answer that, we must confront the political economy of space.

Private development is not neutral. It is a mechanism designed to extract value from land. Decisions about what gets built — and what is deemed “unviable” — are guided by financial logics: viability appraisals, projected returns, market absorption rates, asset appreciation and return-on-investment models that privilege private gain over public good. These mechanisms routinely override social, cultural and ecological priorities. Affordable housing gets “value-engineered” out. Cultural assets become marketing tools for lifestyle districts. Communities are consulted but rarely empowered.

Beneath all of this sits an unspoken truth: communities create value. Developers capture it.

But what if we flipped that logic? What if communities — particularly those whose cultural labour, commitment, care, social life and history make neighbourhoods vibrant — were recognised as co-authors of urban value? What if communities were understood as value creators — not in symbolic terms, but in economic, spatial, and infrastructural terms? What if development began with the people who already hold the cultural, infrastructural and imaginative intelligence that makes a city liveable?

This is the terrain my work has been exploring. From project like Developers’ Dinner which convenes the alternative value generators of place, to ‘Beats, Rhymes and Cities’, which engages creative practice, architecture and technology to have accessible, participatory and community-led conversations about urban design, I have been forming a body of practice that insists on a different development paradigm — one grounded in community power, cultural infrastructure and spatial justice.

Communities Are Not Stakeholders — They Are Co-Developers

Policy often frames communities as consultees, participants, “voices to be heard.” But communities are not peripheral to development; they are its foundation. Their cultural life, social networks, economic practices, and collective histories create the very atmosphere and desirability that private development later monetises.

The Developers’ Dinner was born from this tension. Artists, young people, elders and cultural workers gathered to ask a simple question with profound implications:
If we create the value of a neighbourhood, why don’t we have a stake in its future?

We talked about cities as cultural ecosystems, not markets. About imagination as infrastructure. About how communities might claim their rightful role as co-developers, not merely consultees in decisions that reshape their lives.

Policy implication:
Embed community-led development models into planning strategy, with access to land, planning power, and capital. This means creating commitments and enabling conditions for community development trusts, shared ownership structures and mechanisms that give civic groups leverage before land is allocated or deals are signed. If development continues to reward extractive value capture, inequity is not an accident — it is the system working as designed.

Cultural Production Is Urban Infrastructure

Planning traditionally defines infrastructure as hard systems: transport, utilities, housing, drainage. But cultural life — the ways communities gather, create, organise, struggle, remember, and celebrate — is just as infrastructural. It sustains belonging. It creates collective memory. It shapes the emotional and social foundations of a place.

ABUELOS, developed through Hood Futures Studio, challenges the idea that cultural production is an “amenity.” We are preparing to develop ABUELOS as a community-owned cultural centre designed as civic infrastructure: accommodation, artist studios, archives, a theatre, education programmes — where the method of its design, construction and maintenance is also testament to radical hospitality in the time of displacement. With ABUELOS, culture is not just a matter of programming, but is systems of care, creativity, futures-building and memory-making. The building isn’t an afterthought to culture; it is culture — materially, spatially, politically. ABUELOS is designed for the long term — a Black-led cultural institution that claims permanence rather than precarity, and provides a lighthouse for community in the wake of compounding crises.

Beats, Rhymes and Cities further explored culture as infrastructure by using music — the collective pulse of a community — as spatial data. Using AI and 3D printing, we transformed rhythms into architectural forms. Children, elders, poets, musicians, and non-designers generated spatial possibilities that reflected their own frequencies and lived experience. With this project and the haptics of being in communion to design propositionally using our own cultural references, we know that life-affirming urban design emerges from lived culture, not imposed from above.

These practices ask: What would it mean for planning to treat cultural intelligence as a form of technical expertise? What if a community’s rhythms, stories and histories were considered data?

Policy implication:
Expand the definition of infrastructure to include cultural, social and epistemic systems beyond the institutional elites — and fund them accordingly, with the same rigour and seriousness of roads and housing. Culture, particularly at the grassroots, is not a sector; it’s a power-generating civic technology.

Spatial Justice Is a Design Question

If private development centralises power, spatial justice seeks to redistribute it. But justice is not only about fair outcomes — it’s about transforming the methodology through which decisions are made, so that we not only acknowledge historical harms, but we make right in the present as a pathway for liberatory futures.

Many planning processes rely on quantitative data while neglecting the qualitative, lived, cultural insights that communities hold. This asymmetry produces developments that are (questionably) technically efficient but socially fragile at best, violent at worst. In most cities, the design process is still concentrated in the hands of a small group of professionals, institutions and private actors. Community involvement is treated as an input, not an authority. “Consultation” becomes a ritual of validation rather than a site of distributed power. And so the same patterns repeat: the communities who generate the cultural identity and civic life of a place are extracted and sidelined from the systems that determine its future.

This is why shifting the design methodology is essential to achieving spatial justice.
Justice cannot emerge from unjust design processes.

Hood Futures Studio was created as a counter-practice, to address the historical and contemporary displacement and dispossession of land, memory and culture our communities in the inner-cities face. Our counter-practice is one where imagination, research and political education converge as tools for spatial transformation. Our R&D method engages land reclamation, I & I economics, physical builds, labs, prototypes, demonstrators, residencies and communal learning to explore futures grounded in Black imagination, ends tactics and collective knowledge systems. We treat design as governance — a way of reshaping not only what gets built but how decisions are made and whose ideas are considered legitimate.

Rather than starting with a developer’s vision or a planning officer’s constraints, we begin with community knowledge systems: reasoning, Black geographies, diasporic memory, feminist methodologies, abolitionist principles, local and collective histories, sound, ritual, rhythm. These inform the design — not as “engagement,” but as the foundational logic of the project.

The result is not just different buildings.
It is a different distribution of power.

This approach reveals that when communities imagine, we’re already planning. When we prototype, we’re already designing. When we build, we’re already governing.

When we see design as governance, everything changes.

• The workshop becomes a policy tool.

• The rehearsal room becomes a planning chamber.

• The story circle becomes a site of spatial intelligence.

• The community prototype becomes a legitimate design brief.

Policy implication:
Make participatory design a foundational requirement, not a symbolic gesture, or a tactic for validating already established plans. Treat community research and cultural expression as a legitimate form of planning intelligence. Justice must be embedded at the start of every design process, not patched in at the end.

Policy Recommendations: A Framework for Community-Led Development

If our cities are to be shaped by the people who live, struggle, dream, and create within it, then local authorities and planning bodies must get serious about spatial justice, community ownership and equitable development. In turn, policy must shift from symbolic engagement to structural redistribution. Below is a set of actionable recommendations I discussed with a group at the summit that move from principles to practice — each designed to centre social-cultural infrastructure, community knowledge and long-term stewardship in urban development.

1. Establish Community Development Rights in Planning Policy

Introduce a “Right to Co-Develop”
Local Plans and regeneration frameworks should include mechanisms that grant community organisations, cultural institutions, youth collectives, and civic groups the right to act as co-developers on significant projects within their neighbourhood.

This might mean:

• Early-stage access to planning information, not post-design consultation.

• The right to develop alternative proposals or counter-designs.

• The ability to influence the design brief before procurement begins.

• Priority access to meanwhile uses, pilot projects, and transitional spaces.

2. Create Community Benefit Mandates in Regeneration Projects

Tie planning approval to demonstrable community benefit
Local authorities should require all major developments to produce a Community Value Assessment alongside economic viability assessments. This must include:

• Cultural impact assessments

• Displacement risk modelling

• Local wealth-building analysis

• Commitments to land stewardship and long-term affordability

• Community governance structures post-occupancy

• Accountability measures for breach to community commitments

Planning approval should be conditional on meeting agreed community benefit thresholds — defined by residents and local cultural organisations, not solely by developers.

3. Fund Cultural Infrastructure as Core Urban Infrastructure

Create ring-fenced Cultural Infrastructure Funds
Just as cities fund transport, utilities and housing, they must structurally fund cultural and social infrastructure. This means establishing a dedicated municipal fund to support:

• Community-owned cultural spaces

• Archives and memory projects

• Artist studios and civic laboratories

• Local creative economies and training

• Locally-owned cultural land trusts

This is not a proxy for private-led trojan horse corporations to manipulate and abuse resources under false pretence the way Section 106 is distorted. Funding should acknowledge the radicalisation of risk and therefore prioritise local Black-led, migrant-led, working-class and place-based organisations with deep community roots.

4. Support Community Land Ownership and Stewardship

Establish Community Land Banks or Cultural Land Trusts
Land is the foundation of spatial justice. Local authorities should transfer underused public land, vacant assets, and meanwhile-use sites into community stewardship models.

This can include:

• Community land trusts (CLTs)

• Cultural land trusts (CLTs+)

• Cooperative ownership structures

• Long-term peppercorn leases

• Asset transfers to community organisations with substantial terms (min. 25 years)

These mechanisms prevent displacement, stabilise cultural life, create an invitation to return post-lack-of-opportunity-exodus and enable long-term community wealth building.

5. Build Community Design Boards With Formal Planning Power

Create community-led design governance structures
Every major development area should include a civic-selected Community Design Board composed of local residents, youth, cultural workers, artists, elders, and civic organisers — with statutory influence over design decisions.

Boards should have the authority to:

• Approve design briefs

• Review developer submissions

• Commission community-led spatial research

• Assess cultural and social impact

• Veto proposals that threaten displacement or cultural erasure

This shifts consultation from symbolic to legislative.

6. Integrate Community Research Into Planning Intelligence

Treat lived experience as evidence
Local authorities should expand their definition of planning data to include community-generated research:

• Story-based impact research

• Cultural mapping

• Memory work

• Soundscape analysis

• Youth-led urban research

• Grassroots data collection

These insights should sit alongside technical assessments in all planning applications.

A “Community Intelligence Standard” can be introduced — a required component for all major developments.

7. Reform Procurement to Prioritise Community Wealth-Building

Mandate procurement criteria based on local social value and cultural benefit
This includes:

• Priority hiring for local and underrepresented groups

• Contracts for local creative workers and community organisations

• Funding for apprenticeships in architecture, planning, and construction

• Requirements for public art and community archives tied to development

Procurement should reward organisations that build local capacity — not just deliver buildings.

8. Strengthen Anti-Displacement Frameworks

Make displacement-risk analysis mandatory
All major developments must conduct displacement projections, addressing:

• Housing affordability

• Cultural displacement

• Economic displacement

• Demographic shifts

• Loss of social infrastructure

If displacement risk surpasses agreed thresholds, a mitigation plan must be produced or the development should be refused.

9. Sacralise Participatory Design as a Core Method

Participatory design must move from being a best practice to a statutory requirement.

This can include:

• Mandatory community workshops during early-stage design

• Co-authored design briefs

• Community prototyping phases

• Participatory budgeting for local infrastructure

• Design residencies embedded within communities

Local authorities should publish a Participatory Design Toolkit to guide this work.

10. Resource the Imagination

Urban planning must fund imagination as a civic tool.

This means:

• Grants for community-led worldbuilding and scenario planning

• Artist residencies tied to planning departments

• Youth imagination labs for future citymaking

• Cultural research embedded in spatial strategy

Cities cannot achieve justice with the same imagination that produced inequity. Funding community imagination is not ornamental — it’s infrastructural.

Spatial justice requires three shifts:

1. Redistribute power

Give communities formal authority in development processes.
Move them from consultees to co-governors.

2. Redistribute resources

Fund cultural infrastructure, provide access to land and integrate community research into planning intelligence.

3. Redistribute value

Ensure the communities who create value share in the wealth, ownership and future of their neighbourhoods.

Cities are not just made of concrete and capital; they are made of memory, rhythm and collective imagination. If the built environment is the stage on which our lives unfold, then it matters who gets to write the script. It matters whose stories become structure, whose desires become design, whose knowledge becomes law.

We are long past the point of treating community power as a symbolic gesture. The crises facing our cities — housing precarity, cultural erasure, social fragmentation, ecological stress — cannot be solved with the same extractive development models that produced them.

The task now is to build differently.

To build with communities, not around them.
To treat cultural life as infrastructure, not aftercare.
To see imagination not as decoration, but as strategy.

I often return to that kid with the Maths textbook — the one drawing fictional cities in the margins, building worlds from the scraps of grid paper, stories and imagination. What she didn’t know then is that those sketches were early attempts to understand power, care and possibility. They were rehearsals for a life spent asking not just what a world looks like, but who it’s built for. I was not just gaming. I was training.

If we invest in the people who already hold the intelligence, culture and courage that keep our neighbourhoods alive, then the futures we build will not just be more just — they will be more beautiful, more resilient, and more worthy of us.

If there is anything I hope this work contributes, it is the belief that community imagination is not speculative — it is infrastructural. And when we build from that place, we create futures that are more loving, dignifying and enabling.

It’s 2025 — twenty years since Hurricane Katrina ruptured New Orleans and revealed, with devastating clarity, what climate crisis looks like through the lens of racial capitalism. After Hurricane Beryl in 2024 tore the roof off my family home and felled the beloved mango trees in the yard that sustained us when the economy couldn’t, my research into climate colonialism, complex weather patterns, and community mobilisation intensified, particularly drawing me to explore where histories of conquest, extraction and resistance intersect with contemporary climate collapse.

I keep returning to the question: what happens when the storm doesn’t end?
Because for many of us—Black, island-born, or diaspora-tied—the storm is not a moment in time. It’s a system: a system within which climate colonialism continues to unfold.

It’s 2025 — again, Jamaica is counting her losses.
Hurricane Melissa, the most powerful storm in the island’s recorded history, made landfall this week, tearing through many of the parishes, including my ancestral homes of St Elizabeth and Westmoreland on the west coast. The destruction is still being tallied: homes flattened, lives lost, farms flooded, families displaced. Electricity grids are down; internet connections are patchy. But even as the rain subsides, the deeper reckoning begins.

Because this moment feels hauntingly familiar.
Louisiana has some lessons to share. After Katrina, the waters receded, but the devastation lingered for decades, revealing the racial and economic fault lines of a nation built on extraction. Two decades on, the same logic—the same hierarchy of whose lives are protected and whose are neglected—is visible again, this time across the Caribbean Sea.

Jamaica’s crisis is not just meteorological. It’s structural.
The storm is not an aberration of the system. The storm is the system.

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Climate Reparations and the Debt of Empire

Climate colonialism describes the ongoing ways in which imperial histories shape today’s ecological disasters. The geopolitical Global North’s wealth — fuelled by centuries of enslavement, monoculture and extraction — built the very carbon economy now setting the tropics ablaze. In that sense, Hurricane Melissa isn’t simply a “natural disaster”; it’s an event engineered by historical design.

Calls for climate reparations are often flattened into demands for international aid, but reparations, properly understood, mean restoring what was stolen, restructuring the conditions of life itself and rewriting the contract between human society and the earth. For island nations like Jamaica, former colonial conquests turned tourist economies, reparations can’t be tethered to short-term disaster relief.

Reparations must address the centuries-long architecture of extraction—of land, minerals, culture and labour—that left these nations structurally vulnerable to environmental catastrophe. Colonialism didn’t just drain resources; it designed vulnerability: low-lying plantations, monoculture economies, debt dependency, fragile institutions. And continues to do so. Katrina showed this: it was “a storm that exposed the system”. Reparations, then, must mean redistribution of power, capital, and the right to determine how we rebuild — not just funds. Reparations here must be understood as return, not relief—a return of agency, of ecological autonomy, and of resources stolen under colonialism’s long, death-advancing shadow. It’s about rebalancing a planetary economy that still routes wealth northward while the geopolitical south literally sinks.

“The climate crisis is not just environmental; it’s about who we love enough to save.”
— Colette Pichon Battle

When we speak of climate change, we often default to data — temperature thresholds, carbon targets, projected sea rise. But those numbers conceal what the crisis really exposes: the hierarchies of care that shape who receives protection, and who is left behind. Whether those hierarchies are racial and economic or colonial and geographic, at the core, the climate emergency is not just a technical problem — it is a moral one.

Land Without Paper

In Jamaica, land carries memory. Across the island, families live on plots passed down through generations — land often without deeds or titles, held by trust and kinship. This form of tenure often stems from capture land — when former oppressors took flight back to after being compensated post-abolition. And while some believe this kind of tenure resists the colonial system of commodified property, it is clear that in the era of climate disaster, that resistance becomes a liability.

When a hurricane destroys a home or field, government relief programmes demand proof of ownership. Without paper, there is no aid. Bureaucracy turns ancestral legitimacy into invisibility. The storm does not discriminate, but the paperwork does.

What is needed now is a legal re-imagination of the land system — one that recognises communal stewardship and ancestral inheritance as valid, binding forms of belonging. A Jamaica that truly learns from its past must rebuild law in the image of its people, not its colonisers.

“The land remembers before we do. Our survival depends on that memory.”
— Chief Richard Currie

How do we structure relief, structural investment and rebuilding programmes that recognise community tenure over abstract legal regimes?

This legal reimagination might include:

• Community registers that record land occupation and use, maintained by the local community and recognised by the state.

• Flexible tenure mechanisms that reflect Caribbean inheritance practices—shared land, family plots, customary use.

• Disaster-contingent tenure protection, so that if a parcel is destroyed by flood or hurricane, the occupant retains claim for rebuilding, not eviction.

• Land-use planning that is climate-sensitive: recognising flood-prone zones, elevating housing, restoring natural buffers (mangroves, wetlands) and giving communities voice in those decisions.

Simply put: land rights in Jamaica must be re-anchored in relationship, not paperwork. Without that anchor, as Katrina showed and Melissa potentially unearths, communities may lose not only homes, but the legal basis to rebuild.

When Financial Systems Fail

Even before Melissa, Jamaica’s financial infrastructure was fragile. Transferring money to the island often meant navigating predatory fees and rigid systems. Now, as physical bank buildings crumble and digital networks falter, the limitations of these systems are exposed.

After Katrina, displaced residents in Louisiana struggled for months to access their own savings or insurance. Informal networks collapsed under stress. We’re seeing early signs of similar paralysis here: remittances delayed, relief funds trapped in bureaucratic purgatory, and rural parishes cut off from the flow of capital.

The question is not simply how to repair banks or rebuild credit unions. If the formal banking and financial architecture fails, what fills the void? What kinds of diaspora-value chains and mutual-aid networks can be resilient? How do we design systems that can survive disaster — financial infrastructures grounded in community trust, not corporate reliability. Jamaica has long relied on grassroots economies—pardna savings circles, remittance networks and cooperative credit unions. The future lies in scaling these traditions, fusing technology with communal ethics, ensuring that value flows even when the grid fails.

What if we socialised and embedded throughout neighbourhoods infrastructure for:

• Decentralised financial platforms: Remittance flows need to link to community-led funds rather than large banks alone. Blockchain, peer-to-peer networks, community credit systems might help — but only if designed locally, not imposed externally.

• Emergency cash-flow systems: Instead of waiting for bureaucratic relief, communities must have funds pre-positioned, locally stored and accessible even when central systems fail.

• Diaspora mobilisation as infrastructure: Instead of diaspora simply sending money, what if the diaspora co-owned rebuilding finance, infrastructure bonds, mutual insurance schemes for Jamaica’s parishes?

• Digital resilience: Ensuring that internet, mobile-money, and telecommunications are disaster-hardened — not only for commerce but for relief coordination, peer networks and rebuilding.

• Local ownership of infrastructure: Credit unions, community banks, savings cooperatives must be built with climate resilience in mind — elevated buildings, backup generators, solar-microgrid connectivity.

Reparations, in this context, mean financial sovereignty: the right to route resources on our own terms, without waiting for colonial intermediaries to approve survival.

When the Food Basket Empties

I am the daughter and granddaughter of farmers, rice planters and fishermen. My ancestral parish of St Elizabeth is known as Jamaica’s “food basket”—fertile soils, generational farmers, living knowledge of yam, ackee, sugar cane, pigeon peas and more. But hurricanes, droughts and soil erosion have long been pushing the parish into unrecognisable territory. Then comes Melissa, flattening large parts of the coastline and interior; now entire fields are underwater, farms and crops are obliterated, hospitals roofless, schools and churches demolished, homes swept aside…

When ecosystems are damaged to unrecognisable states, the loss goes deep:

• Croplands once productive may become salt-waterlogged or too eroded to farm.

• Farming knowledge — what the land remembers — cannot always be easily recovered, especially when elders and community networks are disrupted.

• Food security collapses. A parish that feeds Jamaica now may become one that relies on imports, worsening dependency and vulnerability.

When ecosystems collapse, it’s not just livelihoods that vanish — it’s knowledge. Farming is an archive of the body: when to sow, how to nurture life from soil, what wind carries rain. Each lost farm is an erased chapter of ecological memory.

In Louisiana, Katrina not only destroyed homes — it destroyed livelihoods, community connections, ecological and cultural memory. In Jamaica, rebuilding ecosystems means investing in agro/afroecology, soil restoration, seed-sovereignty, supporting farmers as climate first-responders. It means recognising that food systems are part of the climate infrastructure.

When the food basket empties, we urgently need to invest in:

• Community-owned food and community hubs, storage systems and cooperative farms.

• Land-use realignment: climate adaptive agricultural practices, restoring mangroves and wetlands as storm buffers.

• Training and resources for younger generations of farmers, linking diaspora knowledge and capital to land-based climate adaptation.

• Local markets and supply chains that do not rely solely on export or tourism income. A climate-resilient Jamaica must feed itself first.

The restoration of the “food basket” must be understood as reparative work, healing not only the earth but the social systems entangled with it.

Disaster as Mirror

Every storm holds up a mirror to governance. Katrina revealed that infrastructure built on inequality collapses along racial lines. Jamaica’s Hurricane Melissa is revealing that infrastructure built on extraction collapses along colonial ones.

Disaster is not an interruption of normalcy — it’s an acceleration of what was already breaking. Relief is only the first act; the real work is structural. Jamaica must integrate climate resilience into everything — housing, education, healthcare, digital access, energy—rather than treating each hurricane as an exceptional event.

This demands community-centred governance: empowering local councils, community groups, cooperatives and parish leaders to plan their own recoveries. That is to say, we must imagine and orient towards systems where every parish has its own blueprint for survival, guided by local knowledge and transnational solidarity. Centralised relief may distribute aid, but it rarely distributes power.

The Second Wave: Extractive “Rebuilding”

What follows disaster is often more dangerous than the storm itself: the opportunism of redevelopment. In post-Katrina New Orleans, “rebuilding” meant gentrification, displacement, and profit masquerading as progress. Jamaica now stands on the same precipice: displacement disguised as progress. Extractive economies prey on crisis. They turn wreckage into opportunity — for someone else.

The predatory approach to development was already restricting the people of Jamaica’s access to their homeland. On my last trip to Jamaica, I learned how rivers were being forcefully diverted to make way for private tourism-led development, resulting in severe flooding and drought across the island as the river seeks to remember its way home. Already, investors are eyeing the coasts, proposing resorts and private estates under the guise of economic recovery. This is extractive development in its purest form — using catastrophe as a clearing mechanism for new profit. If unchallenged, post-hurricane, it will rebuild Jamaica not for Jamaicans but for tourism, speculation and the global elite.

The Caribbean has always been the testing ground for capitalism’s mutations — from plantation to debt economy to climate finance. But we have the opportunity, now, to refuse this repetition.

True reconstruction must resist the seduction of capitalism. We must prioritise community ownership, ecological restoration and cultural memory. The task is not to restore what was, but to redefine what can be — a Jamaica that is sovereign in both land and imagination.

Diaspora: From Remittance to Reckoning

The Jamaican diaspora has long been a lifeline. Money sent home keeps families afloat, builds schools, sustains parishes. But the scale of this climate crisis demands something beyond charity. Those who have profited — or benefited — from Jamaica’s culture, minerals, creatives, music, tourism must recognise an ecological and moral debt. We must ask: what have we taken? What do we return?

I was at a dinner not too long ago sharing how we were developing a resource mobilisation effort that expands pardna to support Jamaica’s climate resilience. Someone responded that “Jamaica was a lost cause because climate would kill it soon anyway.” Needless to say, that conversation went no further and we didn’t end up collaborating. Diaspora must move from disregard or remittance to reckoning. Those of us who live in countries that enriched themselves through Jamaica’s extraction —whether cultural, mineral, or human — must now act as co-architects of the island’s possibility.

That means investing not just funds but knowledge, networks and political pressure. It means demanding global climate reparations, supporting community-governed funds, and standing between Jamaica and the predatory developers who will surely circle in the aftermath of Melissa.

If we have profited from Jamaica’s brilliance, we must also be accountable to its survival. Maybe mobilisation might look like:

• Diaspora-led investment funds for parishes like St Elizabeth and Westmoreland, with governance by local residents, transparent mechanics, and climate-resilience built in.

• Skill-transfer networks: engineers, organisers, architects from the diaspora collaborating with Jamaican communities to design disaster-resistant housing, micro-grids, agro-systems.

• Ethical profit-return mechanisms: if someone outside of the country profits from Jamaican culture (music, cuisine, tourism brand), a portion should be reinvested into climate-resilience, community land trusts, local education initiatives, youth farming programmes, memory keeping.

• Advocacy and pressure: diaspora communities lobbying states and institutions for climate reparations, debt cancellation and international law reforms that recognise island nation vulnerability.

In short: diaspora must shift from donor-recipient logic to partnership logic. Jamaica’s future is not a charity case — it is a shared project. At the inception of Hood Futures Studio’s longterm strategic plan, we began with thinking about value creation from our work and diasporic resource flows to bring these mobilisation efforts to life. Now, in the wake of Hurricane Melissa, we’re keen to connect with others interested in banding longterm resources together for Jamaica sovereignty.

People-Powered Futures

The most urgent lesson from both Katrina and Melissa is this: state neglect kills, but community saves. Across Jamaica, people are already organising — clearing roads, pooling food, checking on elders, rebuilding roofs by hand. These actions are not small; they are the blueprint.

The future of Jamaica will not be dictated in conference rooms or philanthropic donor reports. It will be written in the fields, the fishing towns, the market squares — by those who live the consequences and still dare to imagine otherwise.

This is the work of people-powered futures:
A Jamaica rebuilt on trust, memory, radical imagination, community power and care.
A nation that does not wait to be saved, because it has learned to save itself.
A people that lead the shaping of new futures, in all their plurality, on their own terms.

This is the island being reborn in the aftermath of the storm.

Jamaica. Land we love.

Support Jamaica to rebuild:

https://supportjamaica.gov.jm

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-rebuild-accompong-black-river-after-hurricane

https://www.gofundme.com/f/CaribbeanHurricaneFund

https://givebutter.com/walkgoodjamaica

https://www.foodforthepoorja.org

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That being said, I can’t help but note the widening gap between the intention to build alternative futures and the skills needed to make them real. At this conjuncture we find ourselves at, across social movements, community organisations and cultural initiatives, there is no shortage of imagination — but there seems to be a restriction around operational capacity.

This isn’t a failure of creativity or conviction; it’s, in part, a structural outcome of how the nonprofit industrial complex has grown. Over the past three decades, movements once led by collectives, unconstituted faith groups, mutual aid and cooperative infrastructures have been folded into the logics of institutionalisation. Activism became “capacity building.” Liberation work became “impact.” Vision was reframed as “deliverables.” In the process, the infrastructures of change began to mirror those of the systems they sought to dismantle.

Many of us want to be part of movements for change — to imagine and materialise better systems. But good intention alone doesn’t construct infrastructure. That work relies on forms of technical literacy: the under-wiring of systems, administration, orchestration, data, governance, codes, digital architecture, operations — the quiet, unseen labour that keeps things working.

Now, as we try to build alternative futures — equitable, ecologically sound, justice-oriented — we find ourselves needing the very technical proficiencies that capitalism has monopolised. Those that are essential to sustain the work. Yet these are the skill sets cultivated, resourced abundantly and rewarded in the corporate world, not in movements. The people with the skills to operate and maintain complex systems are drawn into industries that pay not just salaries, but status, security and belonging. Meanwhile, the organisations attempting to build alternative paradigms and third horizons operate on grant cycles and goodwill. We cannot match the bonuses, nor the stability, of the systems we’re trying to reimagine. So we rely on those who are disillusioned with corporate life — the ones willing to trade money for meaning. Of the few that make the transition, they come to movement-based organisations seeking purpose, but often find precarity.

Philanthropy’s Role in Rewiring

If the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) is the architecture that has disciplined and domesticated radical imagination, then philanthropy is its power supply. It is the current that flows through almost every social-change organisation — and with it comes the circuitry of control. The problem isn’t only how little money there is moving; it’s how that money moves, who decides where it goes, and what logics shape its distribution.

For decades, philanthropy has acted as both a benefactor and a gatekeeper. It sustains the very movements that critique it, while dictating the pace and language of their survival. This contradiction sits at the centre of the NPIC: the idea that liberation can be administered through compliance, application portals, and evaluation frameworks. In this system, administrative skill becomes a survival mechanism, and visionary labour gets translated into grant-friendly language.

But there are signals — fractures — that something is shifting. Across the field, new constellations of practice are emerging: from Good Ancestor Movement to Transition Resource Circle, to foundations experimenting with spend-downs, reparative transfers and mission-aligned endowments. Together, they gesture toward a new philanthropic metabolism — one that recognises its own complicity, and begins to move differently.

Traditional philanthropy has functioned as a mechanism for preserving wealth — not redistributing it. Endowments are invested in extractive markets, generating returns that fund grants — often a fraction of the profit extracted from the very communities those grants claim to serve. Some foundations have begun to disrupt this logic by committing to spend-out or spend-down strategies — pledging to deploy all their assets within a fixed timeframe rather than perpetuate institutional longevity. This act reframes philanthropy as a transitional tool, not a permanent institution.

Others are moving toward mission-aligned endowments, redirecting investments away from fossil fuels, prisons and exploitative industries, and into cooperative, community-owned, or regenerative economies. These shifts matter because they acknowledge a core truth: money is not neutral. The origins of philanthropic wealth — colonial extraction, labour exploitation, dispossession — must inform how and where it is returned.

These approaches contrast starkly with traditional philanthropy’s obsession with control: application cycles, reporting burdens and risk management frameworks designed to reassure trustees more than to resource communities. In a decolonial frame, risk is redefined: the risk is not in giving too freely, but in maintaining hoarded capital that withholds collective possibility.

To repair the damage philanthropy has done and continues to perpetuate, funding must move beyond transactional grants and into transformative resourcing. That means long-term, unrestricted, trust-based capital that centres relationships over reporting. It means funding infrastructure — the administrative, technical, and operational capacities that enable movements to sustain themselves beyond any single grant.

It also means funding transitions of ownership: land back, cultural asset transfers and reparative endowments that move control from foundations to the communities most impacted.

Rewiring the Engine Room

Every movement, organisation, or vision of a liberated future has an engine room. It’s the unseen circuitry — the administrative, technical, financial, digital, and care systems that convert collective intention into sustained practice. Yet under the nonprofit industrial complex, this engine room has been rewired to serve the logic of survival, not transformation.

We have learned to run on minimal voltage — patching together infrastructures from grant to grant, person to person. The very systems that should keep us steady have been built on instability. This is the paradox: we are building alternative futures on infrastructures inherited from extractive ones. The code we’re working from — the fiscal year, the reporting template, the deliverable, the metrics — was never designed to hold liberation.

The skills gap sits here, inside this engine room. The technicians, analysts, administrators, project managers and builders who could maintain and strengthen our infrastructures have been priced out of justice-based work. They are absorbed by corporate ecosystems that reward efficiency without ethics, while our sectors — underfunded and overburdened — are left improvising capacity. This isn’t a lack of talent. It’s a structural outcome of how money and power flow.

And this is where philanthropy must intervene differently — not as benefactor, but as systems engineer. The rewiring of the engine room requires investment that recognises administration, technology and operational design as key instruments towards liberation. Philanthropy, if it is intending to be in any way right-shaped right sized for our current context, must stop funding only the visible outputs and start acknowledging the invisible architecture that makes those things possible.

Rewiring the engine room means:

• Re-establishing trust at the heart of resourcing and funding partnerships, where the distinction between ‘granter’ and ‘grantee’ is dissipated to recognise mutual learning partners.

• Re-coding the language of funding so that “overhead” becomes “infrastructure”; so that back-end work is also seen as frontline work and that work is resourced with less stipulation - longer term, more flexibility, where unrestricted really means unrestricted.

• Redistributing technical power by training and retaining skilled professionals within movement spaces — not as volunteers or sacrifices, but as essential infrastructure workers.

• Re-situating within longer arcs of transformation - the work of structural change organisations shouldn’t be understood through three year funding cycles or five year business plans, but the seven generation ripple effects that are emergent, discovery-led and relational.

• Rebuilding systems literacy across our organisations: making finance, data, governance, and technology part of our shared political education.

• Restructuring philanthropy itself to model the systems it claims to support: transparent, accountable, participatory and designed for eventual handover, not perpetual control.

The philanthropic experiments now emerging — from spend-down foundations to mission-aligned endowments and transition resource circles — are early prototypes of what this rewiring could look like. They suggest a shift from extractive circuitry to regenerative flow: money as energy that moves through rather than accumulates; governance as co-created rather than imposed; infrastructure as commons rather than compliance.

To re-code the engine room is to write new logic into our operating systems. It’s to insist that the operational technologies — payrolls, ledgers, servers, policies, data, buildings — are as political as protest or poetry, so must be reoriented towards enabling conditions. It’s to recognise that liberation requires functional systems built on different values.

We cannot continue running our futures on the inherited software of scarcity.
The engine room needs rewiring — not just to keep the lights on, but to generate new forms of power.

Futures aren’t only imagined. They’re administered, coded, engineered, built and maintained. That maintenance — when situated in a liberatory cosmology — is the quiet revolution. The revolution will not be funded within the nonprofit industrial complex. But it is necessary that the portals towards liberation, crafted in revolution are stewarded by adequately resourced movement infrastructure. Doesn’t roll of the tongue so well.

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As a framework, Radical Hospitality continues to unfold across disciplines — from hospitality itself, to civic infrastructure, to architecture and spatial practice to governance, policy and cultural production. It draws from a long Black feminist and diasporic tradition of making livable space within systems of exclusion. It asks what becomes possible when we approach our institutions, our collaborations and our collective experiments not only as systems to manage, but as spaces to host, while challenging the host vs guest binary: places where the ethics of welcome, boundary, collectivity and repair are woven into the fabric of how we organise and imagine.

This deep investment in hospitality — as concept and practice — feels urgent in an era marked by displacement, dispossession, misinformation, and rising fascism. As the world hardens its borders and narratives, the work of holding space with integrity becomes radical in itself. Radical Hospitality is not a metaphor for kindness; it’s an infrastructure of survival, a methodology for coherence amid fracture. It insists that care, structure, and transformation must live together — that to build otherwise, we must also learn to host otherwise.

The Organisational Nervous System

To root Radical Hospitality within an organisation is to listen to these signals. It’s to understand that the culture we build is not only intellectual or procedural, but deeply embodied.

Every organisation has a nervous system — an invisible yet palpable network that determines how it moves, feels and responds. Like any living organism, it holds memory. It carries stories of urgency, survival, joy, disappointment and hope in its collective tissues. You can sense it in how meetings begin, in how conflict is approached or avoided, in whether rest is permitted or pathologised.

When that system is dysregulated — overextended, undernourished, or fragmented — everything tightens. Communication becomes clipped or overly cautious. People move from connection to protection. Decisions get made in the shadows of scarcity. The organisation starts to mimic the wider conditions it’s trying to transform: extraction, fear, defensiveness.

But when that nervous system is resourced — through relational care, clear agreements, and a rhythm that honours the body — something else becomes possible. The organisation develops a kind of collective proprioception: a sixth sense, an ability to sense itself, to notice imbalance early, to adapt without collapsing. This is not about comfort; it’s about capacity. It’s what allows a team to stay connected even in complexity, to move from reactivity to responsiveness.

Nkem Ndefo’s work on resilience and alchemy offers a profound lens here. She reminds us that resilience is not endurance by any means, but adaptive capacity — the bandwidth to be choiceful about how we move in alignment with our purpose and the ability to maintain connection under stress. Alchemy, in her framing, is the transformative process that happens when discomfort is metabolised rather than suppressed. In this way, the organisational nervous system becomes a site of collective alchemy: a place where tension, instead of being feared, becomes material for growth.

Radical Hospitality within a system, then, is the practice of hosting the organisation’s nervous system with intentionality. It’s not about fixing people, but about cultivating environments where regulation and repair are normal, where pauses are as valued as productivity, and where clarity replaces chaos as the baseline condition for care. It recognises that burnout, conflict and confusion are not personal pathologies but somatic signals — feedback from the system asking for recalibration.

To root Radical Hospitality within an organisation is to listen to these signals. It’s to understand that the culture we build is not only intellectual or procedural, but deeply embodied. The nervous system becomes both mirror and compass: it tells us when our pace is unsustainable, when power is imbalanced, when our internal structures are out of sync with our stated values.

In a culture of Radical Hospitality, tending to this nervous system isn’t ancillary to the work — it is the work. Because if transformation is the goal, then the capacity to stay present, relational and grounded in the midst of it is the infrastructure that makes everything else possible.

Care and Structure Are Not Opposites

We often inherit the belief that care and structure sit on opposite ends of a spectrum — that to be caring is to be flexible, intuitive and emotionally attuned, while to be structured is to be disciplined, efficient and detached. This binary is a colonial artifact, Cartesian in essence, stemming from systems of “value creation” that separated feeling from function, embodiment from intellect, people from process. It’s a split that has made organisations deeply unwell.

Radical Hospitality begins by refusing this split. It understands that care is not the absence of structure — it’s what gives structure meaning. A well-designed process can itself be an act of care. Clear roles, time boundaries, transparent decision-making and explicit expectations are not bureaucratic burdens; they are architectures of safety. They allow people to bring their whole selves to the work without drowning in ambiguity or inequity.

Maurice Mitchell’s Building Resilient Organizations articulates this beautifully when he calls for “cultures of rigour and care.” He recognises that too much structure without care reproduces the very systems of control and punishment we claim to resist, while too much care without structure dissolves into confusion, resentment and burnout. Radical Hospitality lives in the tension between the two — not as a compromise, but as a choreography.

In practice, this means designing organisational rhythms that breathe. Meetings that have spine and softness. Policies — rather, commitments — that protect and evolve. Accountability processes that are built not for blame or shame, but for repair and generative course correction. It’s understanding that clarity is a form of compassion — that people feel most held when they know what they’re being invited into and what’s being asked of them.

This is what it means to build care as design principle rather than sentiment. It’s how we turn values into architecture — how we translate tenderness into governance. Mitchell’s framework grounds the poetic language of hospitality in the pragmatics of governance. He reminds us that care isn’t something that happens after harm — it’s embedded in pay equity, meeting design, conflict processes, and decision-making clarity. Care is not what softens the work; it’s what makes the work possible.

To hold care and structure together is also to refuse the myth of neutrality. Structure is never neutral; it either reproduces harm or redistributes power. Radical Hospitality demands structures that are porous enough to let care flow through, yet grounded enough to sustain it. In this sense, structure becomes the vessel through which care can scale without dilution — an infrastructure for dignity.

When we build this way, our organisations stop oscillating between rigidity and chaos. They start to hum. They begin to feel like places where complexity is held with coherence — where the human and the systemic can coexist. And in that harmony, we glimpse a new organisational ecology: not mechanical, but alive.

Belonging, Discernment and the Complexity of Care

In many movement-based or justice-oriented organisations, belonging is treated as the ultimate proof of a healthy culture — a sign that the team is doing something right. But I want to trouble the idea that belonging in the workplace is the ultimate marker of effectiveness.

Under capitalism, where alienation and disconnection are the norm, it is understandable that people come to liberatory work yearning for refuge. They seek in the organisation what society has denied them: safety, visibility, affirmation, family. These longings are sacred — they speak to our deep human need for connection — but when projected onto the workplace, they create impossible expectations. The organisation becomes not a vessel for shared purpose, but a surrogate for healing, identity, or home.

Nkem Ndefo reminds us that this yearning for sanctuary is precisely what can destabilise an organisation’s nervous system. When the workplace becomes the primary site where people attempt to resolve systemic wounds, the collective’s energy turns inward. The mission begins to collapse under the weight of unmet individualised need. What was once a space for coordinated purpose becomes a theatre of transference — where conflict, disappointment and burnout echo the very traumas we came together to transform.

Radical Hospitality does not deny this longing; it honours it with discernment. It recognises that organisations cannot be homes, but they can be hosts — temporary, intentional containers where care is practiced with reciprocity and boundary, where the conditions for safety are nurtured collectively, not hierarchically nor guaranteed even. Belonging, in this sense, is not unconditional acceptance; it’s mutual accountability. It’s the invitation to show up as a whole person, within a structure that is itself finite and purpose-driven.

In cultures of Radical Hospitality, discernment becomes a collective discipline. Teams learn to differentiate between what belongs to the mission and what belongs to the personal. They develop the capacity to notice when care becomes rescuing, when inclusion becomes avoidance, when empathy becomes enmeshment. This is not coldness — it’s coherence. It’s how we maintain the integrity of the work while still holding one another with respect and tenderness.

This kind of hospitality is not a promise of sanctuary; it’s a practice of stewardship. It says: you are welcome here, and you are also responsible here. It refuses both the transactional logic of corporate belonging and the familial overreach of movement culture. It invites us into right relationship — one that recognises the limits of what an organisation can hold and the abundance of what it can make possible when those limits are respected.

In this way, Radical Hospitality redefines belonging not as safety from the world, but as capacity to face it together.

Resilience as Collective Alchemy

When we practice Radical Hospitality, we become alchemists of the everyday.

When Maurice Mitchell writes about the “dual project” — tending both the external struggle and the internal ecosystem — he’s describing the same alchemical process that Nkem Ndefo names, and that Infrastructures of Care began to trace: transformation as the ability to metabolise contradiction.

This is what resilience really is: not the individual’s capacity to endure pain, but the collective’s capacity to transform energy. To turn conflict into clarity, exhaustion into rhythm and breakdown into revelation. In the context of Radical Hospitality, resilience is less about strength and more about aliveness — about staying supple enough to respond, connected enough to adapt and grounded enough to remember why we’re here.

Yet resilience is so often misinterpreted. In the lexicon of capitalism, it’s framed as toughness — the ability to keep going despite depletion. But Ndefo reminds us that true resilience is relational and rhythmic. It depends on our ability to recover together, to cycle between exertion and rest, to stay connected in the midst of rupture. It’s not a badge of endurance; it’s a practice of restoration.

In organisations committed to transformative change, this redefinition is critical. We are often operating inside hostile conditions — scarcity, precarity, racism, bureaucracy — all of which reward overextension and call it commitment. But a resilient organisation is not one that never breaks; it’s one that knows how to repair. It’s one that recognises rupture as part of the rhythm of growth and has the capacity to return to relationship after disconnection.

Here, I return to a belief that threads through my own work: under capitalism, organisations are not, and cannot be, sites of liberation.As Nkem Ndefo reminds us, under capitalism, there is no such thing as a liberated organisation. “Organisations are simply ways of organising resources”, to quote Malkia Devich Cyril.

If we accept this — that organisations are mechanisms, not movements; containers, not the transformation itself — then resilience becomes less about permanence and more about permeability. It becomes the ability to hold our structures lightly, to adapt them in service of life, not legacy.

Through this lens, the work of Radical Hospitality is to design for alchemy: to use the materials of organisational life — money, time, energy, attention — as instruments of transmutation. Through the intentional and ethical use of resources, we can create portals: temporary but potent architectures that gesture toward the worlds we are longing for.

These portals aren’t illusions of liberation; they are rehearsals for it. We may not be building liberation inside the organisation, but through Radical Hospitality, we can build conditions that prefigure it. We can build spaces where we practice coherence, equity, and tenderness in real time; spaces that give form to our longing and help us remember what it feels like to be whole together — where we remember what it feels like to be in integrity with our own values, even within systems designed to erode them.

Resilience, then, is not the ability to hold everything together, but the willingness to keep reconfiguring the vessel. It is the quiet, disciplined faith that what we build can be both impermanent and holy — that even within the limitations of the organisation, we can still make contact with freedom.

When we practice Radical Hospitality, we become alchemists of the everyday: turning budgets into care, strategy into relationship, and infrastructure into invitation. We learn that resilience is not a destination, but an ecology — a living process through which the impossible becomes, even for a moment, tangible.

This writing sits within a lineage of practice, informed by my journey in youth work, community work, cultural practice and as an incessant listener to the stories of my elders, long before building my own organisation. Then, what began as MAIA — an experiment in building infrastructures of care and cultural agency — has since evolved into Hood Futures Studio: a community infrastructure organisation working to address the root causes of displacement and dispossession in the ends.

That evolution has not been a rupture but a continuation — an unfolding of generative threads that began in the earliest imaginings of MAIA: how to build otherwise, how to hold space for Black life, imagination and belonging amid structures that seek to erase it. Those same threads now extend through new architectures of radical hospitality — from ABUELOS, our emerging “hotel”, cultural centre and home for intergenerational practice, to the ways we design our governance, our residencies and our internal rituals of care.

But this phase of the work also carries new influences, new organisational cultures, and new questions. The conditions have changed; the stakes have deepened. Hood Futures Studio continues to build infrastructures of radical hospitality, but we do so while holding the complexity of what it means to work from within community, against dispossession, and toward self-determined futures.

This offering, then, is not a blueprint — it’s a reflection of that ongoing experiment. It’s written from inside the practice: from the body of a Black woman who has spent years building, breaking, rebuilding and supporting organisations that try to live differently. What follows, and what continues, is a collective effort to remember that structure can be sanctuary, that care can be coherence and that through our work — however temporary, however imperfect — we might still open portals to the worlds we’re longing for.

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If you’re interested in exploring offerings that informed this text, you can check out:

• What Does It Mean to Grow an Organisation as an Infrastructure of Care? - MAIA

• Building Resilient Organizations - Maurice Mitchell

• Nkem Ndefo on Embodying Change in Organizations and Individuals - Rohadi

In Rastafari, the utterance “I & I” is not just a phrase. It is philosophy, theology, economy, and prophecy. It refuses the singular, refuses the illusion of separateness. “I & I” names the divinity within self, within other, and in the relation between us. It is an ontological claim: Jah lives here, in all of us, and in all life.

To live “I & I” is to live interdependence. To see survival not as individual hustle but as collective flow. To measure abundance not by accumulation but by reciprocity.

“I & I Economics” starts from the Rastafari premise that the divine dwells in all beings and that separation is a Babylonian illusion. If divinity lives not only in me but between us, then economy—the management of resources, labour, and value—cannot be reduced to individual accumulation or state control. It must be about nurturing the sacred interconnections of life.

Radical redistribution becomes not only a social or political act, but a spiritual practice of alignment: returning resources to where they have been taken from, restoring flows disrupted by slavery, colonialism, and capitalism. Redistribution reveals the sacred ecology of reciprocity that has always existed: soil feeding seed, rain feeding earth, neighbour feeding neighbour.

In this sense, I & I Economics illuminates the divinity of life by making interdependence material—through circular flows, through cooperative survival, through practices like pardna, through reparations, through refusing extraction. It embodies what Rastafari calls livity: right living, in harmony with natural and spiritual laws.

In this piece, I muse on what happens when we take that philosophy seriously in economics—to build what I call I & I Economies—and how it might illuminate pathways for regenerative, reparative, diasporic futures.

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Roots

This is not new. Leonard Howell’s communal experiments at Pinnacle in the 1930s, as D. A. Dunkley shows, were already economic: collective farming, shared resources, spiritual sovereignty. Barry Chevannes reminds us that Rastafari was always grounded in the world-view of the Jamaican peasantry — subsistence, communalism, resistance to Babylon’s extraction. Verene Shepherd insists that reparations are not only financial redress but relational restoration: “Clean up the mess you left,” she says to colonial powers, naming how extraction must be reversed.

These voices help us see that “I & I Economies” are not abstract; they are embedded in Jamaican intellectual history and tradition, and in the practices of Rastafari that have long resisted Babylon (colonial, exploitative economic order), affirmed Africa, affirmed the sacredness of all life, and asserted communal responsibility. Rastafari has always entwined divinity, survival, and redistribution. Economy is sacred. Sacredness is economic. Economics is how we practice relationship.

Pardna as Living Research

My community pardna experiments continue to legacy of living I & I economies. Pardna—the rotating savings clubs of the Caribbean diaspora—is more than money. It is ritualised trust, a circle of reciprocity, a refusal of banks and credit scores. Each “hand” taken is both resource and recognition that our thrivance is interdependent. In recent years, I’ve organised multiple experiments that seek to engage pardna as a technology for radical resource redistribution - including establishing investment strands to resource hyperlocal Black enterprise, or climate solutions in the Caribbean.

I often name Kwanda, a community-based platform, as an evolution of pardna fit for the 21st century, where diaspora meets philanthropy, using pooled crowdsourced funding to invest in sustainable development throughout the African continent. It’s in the recognition that top-down economies don’t work that we take power back to determine our own futures.

In pardna, resources circulate rather than accumulate. Risk is held in common. Surplus returns to the circle. It is not philanthropy but diasporic, circular redistribution: a sacred economy carried across oceans. For me, pardna is research in practice—an experiment in diasporic regeneration, testing what happens when we trust the circle more than the market or the myth of philanthropic goodness. The power isn’t only financial. It’s emotional and spiritual. It says: we hold each other. Even in precarity, we can circulate resources ourselves. Each contribution is both gift and claim — I give so we all can thrive; I receive because we all trust.

This is the first principle of I & I Economics in action: the economic unit is the circle, not the atomised self.

I & I Economics - Key Tenets

So I’ve been daydreaming… What would an economic framework that acknowledged the sacredness of mutuality, life affirmation, divinity and resource redistribution manifest as? How would it bring to life the core values that have shaped my culture and political consciousness? In what ways might it hold the expansiveness of rupture, and repair, to traverse past, present and futures?

I & I Economics begins with a simple, radical truth from Rastafari thought: we are not separate — Jah lives in all beings and in the space between us. From this truth emerges a new way of thinking about economic life — one rooted in divine relationality and designed to heal the ruptures left by colonial extraction and capitalism. The framework rests on six interwoven tenets: Interdependence over Individualism, which understands the circle — not the isolated self — as the basic unit of survival and abundance; Radical Redistribution & Reparations, committing to return stolen wealth, land, resources and wisdoms to rebalance power for liberated futures; Circularity & Regeneration, aligning resource flows with the renewing rhythms of nature and community; Commons & Collective Stewardship, reclaiming shared ownership of land, knowledge, and tools; Spiritual–Economic Integration, rejecting the split between sacred life and material exchange; and Livity (Right Living), measuring wealth by health, ecology, and cultural flourishing rather than accumulation. Together, these principles speak to an economy where life is sacred and justice circulates.

These are not abstractions. They’re drawn from Rastafari lifeways, diasporic survival strategies, and regenerative economics discourse — and they’re present wherever people are repairing what extraction severed.

Indicators of Thriving I & I Economies

If this is to guide practice, we need new measures of success. GDP cannot hold “I & I.” Instead, thriving economies might be marked by:

• Relational health: trust circles, conflict resolved without extraction, cultural-spiritual participation.

• Interdependence: reciprocity index, reduced variance between richest and poorest in the circle.

• Redistribution: speed of resource circulation, reparative investment in historically harmed communities.

• Regeneration: soil and water health, waste-to-resource cycles, resilience to shocks.

• Commons: % of resources held collectively, generational continuity of stewardship.

• Sacred integration: frequency of economic rituals, lived sense of spiritual meaning in exchange.

• Livity: health, ecology, and cultural flourishing as the truest metrics of wealth.

Effectiveness, then, is not “more wealth” but more balance, reciprocity, sacredness, repair.

Toward an I & I Future

I & I Economics reframes economy as the sacred circulation of resources that honours interdependence, restores justice and sustains life. “I & I Economies” are already here—in pardna clubs, street corner hustles, remittances, land commons, reggae sound systems, ital foodways, reparations demands. They are fragments of another world, one that refuses Babylon’s separation of material from spiritual, of self from other.

The task is to recognise, resource, and regenerate them. To scale without losing the circle’s intimacy. To root redistribution in reverence. To let economy be prayer, practice, philosophy.

Because we are not separate. We are not singular.
We are because I & I are.

“any radical pedagogy must insist that everyone’s presence is acknowledged. That insistence cannot be simply stated. It has to be demonstrated through pedagogical practices. To begin, the [educator] must genuinely value everyone’s presence.”
- bell hooks

When I was doing Theatre in Education (TIE) work in 2010, we were preparing to tour a show around the Midlands with themes of race, class and power. A headteacher of a Worcestershire school told our director “we don’t need to put on a show about racism in school, because there are no Black people here.” True story.

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That sentence has stayed with me. It revealed not only a refusal to see the structures that shape every life, but also the persistent idea that racism is a “minority problem” — relevant only where Black or Brown bodies are present, rather than a system that organises the whole of society. What the headteacher could not (or would not) grasp is that racialisation, like class stratification, is not confined to demographics. It is a way of arranging power. And all of us — regardless of who sits in the classroom — are shaped by it.

bell hooks warned us of this tendency to reduce the classroom to the transmission of facts, stripped of context. For her, the classroom is a “location of possibility,” but only if it becomes a place where students learn to name and contest the structures that govern their lives. To teach is to “transgress” — to resist the boundaries of silence, confinement and avoidance; to create learning that is not about rote memorisation, but about awakening, connection and imagination.. Paulo Freire pressed the same point in Pedagogy of the Oppressed: education either integrates us into the logic of the present system, or it becomes a practice of freedom, the means by which we “deal critically and creatively with reality.” Neutrality, for Freire, was a fiction — one that always served the powerful.

The Worcestershire headteacher’s statement was not neutral. It was itself a pedagogy, one that taught avoidance, denial, and the dangerous illusion that racism only matters when Black people are present. It is precisely this kind of thinking that makes education about power, race, and class indispensable for everyone.

Because racialisation structures who has access to housing, jobs, safety, and dignity. It determines whose histories are told and whose are erased. And it also shapes white children’s sense of self, often leaving them unprepared to recognise their position within a system that privileges them at others’ expense. Education that avoids these realities does not protect children or young people — it leaves them unequipped to understand the world they are inheriting.

Education has always been contested ground. It can be the means by which a society disciplines its citizens into obedience, or the process through which we learn to transform the world. Freire reminds us that education is never neutral: it “either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system,” or it “becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”

Black communities long understood education as a critical site for imagination and consciousness-raising. Out of necessity, they built supplementary schools from the 1960s onwards: spaces where children could learn not only literacy and numeracy, but also the histories and political consciousness denied to them in mainstream schooling. Framings that resituated African and Caribbean experience within a wider arc of liberation. They affirmed Black children as protagonists in their own lives, rather than problems to be managed. These were acts of resistance, but also acts of generosity. They refused the lie that education could be colour-blind or neutral. They insisted that children needed tools to navigate a racialised society — to decode both the explicit exclusions and the subtle manipulations that structured their daily lives.

These schools matter now not only as history but as compass. They show us that when official institutions refuse to nurture our children, communities can—and must—create spaces where truth, dignity, and freedom remain possible.

If these were urgent declarations in their time, they feel like warnings now. Today, the need for this kind of education feels sharper than ever. The classroom is no longer bounded by school walls. It is in the endless scroll of TikTok, the algorithmically curated newsfeed, the AI-generated content that reproduces bias while claiming objectivity at an accelerated speed. Misinformation circulates faster than fact; outrage travels further than care. Political opportunists exploit these dynamics, normalising fascist rhetoric under the guise of “common sense”, pragmatism or patriotism. In such a landscape, education must be more than instruction: it must be training in discernment, in critical consciousness, in the courage to confront what is hidden.

This is not only for Black or Brown children. It is for everyone. Because misinformation and manipulation target all of us. Because authoritarianism corrodes every community. Because racialisation is not just about who is excluded — it is about how society is organised.

To imagine education as liberation today means returning to the insights of Freire and hooks and reimagining them for an intergenerational, intercommunal context. The work cannot begin and end with children alone. As hooks insisted, education is “the practice of freedom” for all of us—young and old, teachers and learners alike. And Freire reminds us that “dialogue cannot exist without humility.” Liberation is never bestowed by one generation upon another; it is made in the space between them. This is where our task becomes clear. If misinformation is to be countered, if fascist creep is to be resisted, if artificial intelligence is to be harnessed for justice rather than domination, then we need an intergenerational pedagogy of liberation. As hooks wrote, “education as the practice of freedom is not just about liberatory knowledge; it’s about liberatory relations.” This is not a task for schools alone, but for communities, families, cultural institutions, and movement spaces.

Across generations, we must weave a pedagogy capable of surviving the present and rehearsing futures we long for. We bring possibility, urgency, fire, bridges between paradigms, memory, continuity and wisdom.

Theatre in Education, supplementary schools, radical study circles, community archives, oral history projects and new experiments in digital pedagogy — all are part of this necessary ecosystem and are key to what must be resourced, amplified and birthed with a rigorous politicised framing across the breadth of the country. Each interrupts the lie that education can or should be neutral. Each insists that power, class, and race are not optional topics but the terrain on which all of our lives unfold.

If that Worcestershire headteacher taught me anything, it is that the refusal to address racism and class in education is itself an education — one that cultivates ignorance, fear and complicity. The alternative is not easy, but it is urgent: to create spaces where truth can be told, where the structures that shape our lives can be named and where we can practice, together, the art of freedom.

To teach ourselves and each other how to read the word and the world, as Freire urged, and to transgress against every boundary that denies us, as hooks insisted. In a time of distortion, education tethered to liberation becomes more than information; it becomes discernment, imagination, survival. It is not just preparation for life—it is life itself, rehearsed in common, across generations. And if we can hold to that, then even in this storm of misinformation, we may yet raise children, youth, adults and elders together into a pedagogy of freedom. A pedagogy that remembers the struggles behind us, speaks honestly to the crises before us, and refuses to stop dreaming into being the worlds that are still to come.

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Malkia Devich Cyril teaches us that grief is all the ways we process change. Every community, every person, every life force is in relationship with grief—because change is constant, and loss is inevitable. But grief is not simply private or individual. It is social, political terrain. What is key here is how grief is metabolised. Radical grievance is what happens when we make meaning out of loss and orient it toward justice. It’s the collective process of saying: something precious has been taken and the path forward is to transform that loss into repair, dignity and liberation.

But today, here in the UK and across the world, grief is being weaponised. On Saturday 13th September 2025, as I stood on Kennington Road in London, swarmed by EDL members waving their flags at me, a lingering thought consumed me — fascists and supremacists are working overtime to organise loss in the opposite direction. Towards isolation, hate, blame, disconnection, violence. They take the very real grief of poor and working-class white communities—towns gutted by deindustrialisation, families destabilised by precarity, health and futures eroded by austerity—and redirect it into grievance against migrants, Black people, queer people, Muslims, anyone who can be made scapegoat. And because grief carries a deep desire for connection and belonging, these narratives are working. The far right is providing coherence, ritual and story where the Left too often offers distance, ridicule, or silence.

In Britain, the landscape is especially stark. Working-class white distress is often caricatured (“chav” stereotypes), pathologised, or instrumentalised in the service of reactionary politics. At the same time, struggles over race and class are held apart in political and media narratives. “Left-behind white towns” appear in one discourse; “racial inequality” in another—rarely connected as part of the same system of dispossession. This is a fragmentation that serves capital and the Right. It keeps us from seeing how austerity, privatisation, borders and policing harm us all, though in uneven and racialised ways.

And grief here is not just about material loss—it is also about the perceived loss of identity. For generations, industrial labour provided not only wages but meaning. Mining, steelmaking, shipbuilding, and manufacturing were more than jobs: they were community identities, interwoven with pride, ritual and solidarity. To be a miner in South Wales, a steelworker in Sheffield, or a shipbuilder on the Clyde was to belong to something larger than oneself. These industries provided a cultural fabric—working men’s clubs, union halls, collective traditions—that tethered identity to place and to work. For many of those arriving here in Britain at the height of industry — coinciding with 1947 partition and Generation Windrush — navigating this culture was also key to survival against the tide of racial violence.

When Thatcher’s government closed the pits, dismantled steel and broke the unions, jobs disappeared—but so did this sense of self. Towns and villages were not only stripped of livelihoods but of the cultural infrastructures that gave life rhythm and recognition. What followed was more than economic crisis: it was a psychic rupture, a profound unmooring of identity. Many poor white communities have never recovered from that break, as partisan politics further entrenches harm, and the longing for belonging the rupture created has become fertile ground for fascists. They know that where industry once gave identity, they can now offer grievance. Where unions once gave solidarity, they can offer scapegoats.

I want to be clear about my language here. I am speaking directly about poor white folks and the lived experience of poverty, not simply “the working class.” In Britain, the identity of “working class” has stretched so wide over the last few decades that it no longer maps neatly onto material deprivation. Middle-class commentators now claim it through accent or heritage, while real experiences of poverty are obscured. I am talking about the people for whom precarity is not an abstraction: families surviving benefit sanctions and in-work poverty, households relying on food banks, communities where entire generations have been stripped of stability, security and dignity. It is this grief—both material and identity-based—that fascists are organising. And it is this grief that liberation movements must learn to organise otherwise.

And I need to be equally clear about something else: this is not my work to do. We need white folks to organise here. White folks who understand the system, who have studied alongside, marched alongside, posted Black squares, built credibility alongside and sought affirmation from Black and racialised leaders—especially since 2020—must now step into responsibility like never before. This is not the time to buckle and adopt Reform logics, nor for symbolic allyship. If we’re afraid, we must feel the fear and lean in anyway. The legitimacy, proximity and resources that middle class and white organisers, strategists, policymakers, activists and movement workers have gained from association with Black and working class leadership cannot remain abstract. They must manifest in action, in organising their own communities toward liberation.

Heavy on “liberation”. Make no missteps with the title of this piece — we need more than “talking to white people” or a redirecting of programmes to focus on the “left behind white communities”. Through these niceties and arbitrary binaries, we risk maintaining a perpetual reversal; a sustained paradigm of haves and have-nots; a deequilibrium that temporarily benefits a few but continually favours extractive power. To really contend with radical grievance is to orient with a politicised analysis of liberation. We are talking a rigorous, astute, multifaceted, systemic, (infra)structural, intersectional framing of liberation that grasps at the root of dispossession and class. Who is doing this work with poor white folks? Those also impacted by the same systems of oppression necessitated by racial capitalism?

Too often, Black leaders—especially Black women—are expected to provide the analysis, the solutions and the labour for escaping every crisis. At the same time, we are invisibilised, erased and silenced in countless ways. This extraction cannot continue. The only way forward is mutual responsibility. Time to step up.

This is why the question must be asked plainly: Who is organising poor white folks towards liberation? Who is speaking with them? Who is reorienting them towards liberation and providing a political, embodied and loving framing that grounds in realities and generative futures? Who is doing the work of listening to grief without shame, of transforming loss into radical grievance that points not at scapegoats but recognises landlords, bosses, and borders? Who is helping them within a broader coalition for liberation, weaving solidarities then across colour lines, refusing both pity and paternalism, but recognising shared precarity as the ground for collective power?

This is not about saving poor white people. It is about refusing to let fascism monopolise their grief. It is about refusing to cede the terrain of belonging, ritual and story to the far right. It is about course correcting and memory work that is rooted in truth without romanticising or rewriting history. It is about building infrastructures—unions, movements, civic and social infrastructures, cultural projects—that can hold the complexity of race and class together, and orient the pain of change toward justice.

We are living through a dangerous convergence: grief is abundant, and fascists are listening closely. Unless movements of liberation can take grief seriously, with white folks organising at the scale of their streets, neighbourhoods, communities, online groups —not just as personal sorrow but as political material—fascism will continue to grow by feeding on the losses of working-class white life.

The task, then, is not only to confront fascism, but to contest its claim on grief. To insist that the longing for belonging, the ache of loss, can be transformed into radical grievance. And to remind ourselves that liberation will not come from dividing struggles, or calcifying binaries, but from learning to grieve—and to organise—together.