Introducing the Radically Reimagining Change peer group!
Tags: Change, Imagination, Learning, Peer To Peer, Social Justice

Introducing the Radically Reimagining Change peer group! Jessica Follow Jul 15 · 8 min read

A group of 12 peers are currently on a journey to radically reimagine our relationship to change. A collaboration beyond our binaries, biases & bedrooms.

We believe that the more people we gather to collectively imagine our future, the more people that future will serve. As we swim the tides of change, small & big, slow & fast, welcome & not-so-welcome, we can learn to adapt together and radically reimagine the world we want to live in. We also believe that our ability to shape change in the world will only be as strong as the relationships that facilitate that change.

So for 6 months, together, we’ll be exploring questions spanning themes from body liberation to punishment — centering emergence, collective radical reimagination and care.

So… without further ado… meet our radical reimaginers!!

Raden Siti Dhiyandra Purnama Putri Natalegawa

Hi! My name is Dhiyandra and I am an Indonesian creative producer and educator born and raised in Brent, London. I believe that through art, we can connect in a deeper and more meaningful way to our environment and community. Throughout the last decade, I have devoted myself to the practice of Art Education as a vehicle for social change.

Learning Question: How can we develop alternative ways to ethically design community art projects as a creative producer/educator?

Find her at: Instagram

Saphra Bennett

Saphra Bennett is a dynamic facilitator and trainer with almost 15 years’ experience of holding space for diverse groups. She has both academic and experiential understanding of some of the most pressing social issues in multicultural and socially diverse communities in Britain.

Saphra considers herself a womanist and as co-founder of Women Conversation: Leeds, has over 6 years of experience hosting intergenerational, women-only, safer spaces. She is passionate about working in a way that encourages deep, honest, authentic connections, finding strength in vulnerability, through active listening and sharing the vast and varying experiences of what it means to be a woman.

Learning Question: How different would the world look, feel, smell, sound, be if women were fully supported to be the happiest and healthiest they could be, in order support the children in the world to be their healthiest and happiest?

Alexia Pepper de Caires

I’m Alexia, a radical, indie bookseller in Birmingham working to platform queer, anti-racist, intersectionally feminist and Black reads. My work is rooted in my anti-oppression beliefs and aims to create space for access to books, zines and other forms of reading. Informed by my activism on #AidToo in recent years, it is also a way to connect me to my new city and provide a service to Brum babs. Gifting solidarity reads is a vital to me as selling full-price books to ensure we value the energy that goes into books. I work as sustainably as possible, selling preloved reads, using reused/ recycled packaging and using an ethical supply chain.

Learning Question: How can I grow my radical bookshop in Birmingham?

Find her at: Instagram

Sophia Courtney

Sophia has a background in systems change thinking and environmental politics, she tries to see the world through the things that connect us together, and connects us to nature. For the last few years she’s primarily been working with businesses to help them to understand systems change and enact positive change, which is enthusing and sobering in equal measures. She fell in love with learning again a few years ago when she went back to Uni to do a masters, and now she’s on a life long pursuit to learn as much as she can, this time with a community of people! She’s recently taken up knitting and has fallen in love with the both the process and everything she’s learnt from the successes and failures at the end of my needles.

Learning Question: How can I understand how I want to exist in the world?

Cristina Cárdenas Mena

Cristina is a brown Spanish psychologist, healer and facilitator. Her roots are in Ecuador and lives between Barcelona and Birmingham. She is passionate about the intersection between individual and collective healing and social justice, decolonization and anti-oppression perspectives. Learning gender and race politics from BIPOC and Queer activists, organizers and academics is giving her a broader and deeper understanding of how our societies are built and the way they influence people as as individuals and as part of a collective. Currently, Cristina is supporting Spanish-speaking people in their healing and liberation journey through 1-on-1 and group sessions. She is particularly interested on how imagination can shape our present.

Find her at: Instagram

Sophie Freeman

Sophie is from — and pleased to be back living in — South East London. She loves to work with others to make things happen. She cares about the stories we tell even if that story is a project plan. She is curious about exploring how we can reimagine radical change.

Learning Question: How might I understand what radical change means to me… and then show up for it?

Elaine Ho

Elaine stumbled headlong into community organising at the start of the pandemic last Spring, helping to set up her local mutual aid group in Kensal Green, NW London where she now supports those with multiple or complex needs in the community. Her work supports neighbours to dream big beyond their current circumstances, and ensures they can access the support to get there.

Elaine’s ‘day job’ is in research and strategy, with a specialism in — you’ve guessed it — communities. She hopes that ‘enrolling’ will help her understand how the communities built and strengthened during the pandemic can better use their collective voices to bring about broader social change.

Learning Question: How can mutual aid remain mutual?

Find her at: Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn

Nicola Haggett

Nicola Haggett (she/her) is a Body Story Liberationist and coach for plus-sized/fat humans. She facilitates fiercely compassionate conversations that create space for folks to make sense of, and explore, their lived experiences in their body. Nicola believes that by rewriting our Body Stories we can disrupt cycles of body shame, blame, & bias, and we can practice our way towards new stories of more joy, compassion, and connection in our bodies. She is a professionally trained life coach, Certified Body Trust Provider. and Trauma-Informed Certified Coach. She sees clients online from her home in East London, where she lives with her husband, Ricky, and their two kids.

Learning Question: How do I embody a practice of Body Liberation in my life, relationships, & professionally?

Find her at: Instagram

Eloise Maxwell

Eloise is a producer for a consultancy specialising in corporate culture change, with over a decade of experience spanning the worlds of contemporary art, design, academia and education. Her work in various cultural institutions and a number of London state schools highlighted the stark inequality of access to the arts in the UK, which runs contrary to the growing body of evidence demonstrating the positive impact of the arts on our health and wellbeing. Eloise is interested in exploring how we might move away from a top-down approach to cultural provision and consumption, towards local, community-driven cultural initiatives.

Learning Question: How might our communities use the arts to forge stronger local ties and a more deeply connected daily existence?

Find her at: Instagram

Art created by Tess Guinery

Darcey Williamson

Darcey is a is a youth worker and informal educator whose practice is informed by a radical youth work paradigm. She employs critical education methods and participatory action research, working with others to co-create projects that challenge epistemic and social injustices. She centers creativity and imagination in collective processes to shape our future from our dreams. In the last two years, she has embarked on a journey of somatic experiencing, exploring embodied transformation for individual, community, and collective liberation.

Learning Question: How do we break our minds free from internalised oppressions so we can access and liberate our imagination?

Co-Hosted with Vanessa Faloye and jessica spencer-keyse

Vanessa Faloye

Vanessa helps change-making organisations design and deliver social justice education and strategy that builds, challenges, and transforms systems of power. As an educator-activist, she is deeply committed to dismantling the intersectional inequities that shape our education system and society as a whole. You’ll find her critically discussing paradigm and pedagogic shifts in social justice in a way that aims to push the boundaries and pull at the edges of transformative learning. She’s got big plans for her vision and mission of collective liberation and a world in which we all get to show up as our whole, free, joyous, and magical selves.

Learning Question: Who am I in relating to change?

jessica spencer-keyse

jess is a Midlands born, Devonshire based education activist committed to working on projects that dismantle the intersectional inequities that shape our society. She draws upon experience as a learning designer, facilitator, researcher and artist to co-organise, weave and nurture communities. Jess is deeply guided by the essence of community organising, learning ecosystems, emergent strategy, somatic healing, cyclical wisdom and radical reimagination. Her experience is also shaped by living with an autoimmune condition and C-PTSD. This has influenced the call to co-create a space where our whole selves, if and when we want to bring them, are always welcome.

Learning Question: What the fuck does it take radically reimagining change?

Find them at: Instagram, Website