● Edventure, Frome
Helping rural learning travel further
When the project Green & Healthy Frome approached the end of its funding period, its creators, Edventure, started asking: How do the lessons from a successful place-based programme travel beyond the place where they happened?
In cities, ideas often spread through dense networks, institutions and professional communities. In rural places, knowledge can remain isolated, held by a small number of people or buried in reports that rarely reach those who could benefit from them.
To grapple with this question in real time with a real project, we joined a cohort of rural practitioners from different communities, helped identify what others needed to learn from Green & Healthy Frome, tested how that learning could be shared in practical ways, and explored how the relationships formed around the work could become part of its legacy.
The result was the Resources for Rural Changemakers collection, designed to help knowledge, experience and insight travel between places.
What we did?
Across six months, we were part of a small cohort of rural changemakers (from different towns, villages, and types of work) and met regularly to:
Surface the learning from Green & Healthy Frome: what did they actually do, what did it enable, and what do others need to understand to adapt it?
Test what “useful learning” looks like in rural places: what formats help people carry knowledge with them when time is thin and everything is dispersed?
Design for dissemination: when a multi-million-pound programme comes to an end, how does the knowledge travel beyond the core team, so it doesn’t just sit in a folder or in people’s heads?
Build the relational infrastructure alongside the resources: the cohort itself became part of the learning. A repeated realisation was, “we’d never have met otherwise”, despite living close-ish geographically.
Those sessions shaped the spine of the Resources for Rural Changemakers collection: what to include, what to leave out, and how to make it legible and usable.
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A co-created collection of audio recordings, transcripts, and practical link directories made with rural changemakers across Wiltshire, Somerset and Dorset.
They’re designed for people who are:
just starting out
already running something and feeling stretched
looking for practical next steps that fit rural realities
They don’t offer a perfect blueprint. They offer handrails: examples, prompts, and grounded guidance you can adapt to your place.
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Alongside the others in the co-hort, we supported Edventure to:
surface the learning from years of place-based work (what’s actually useful, not just what’s “nice to say”)
shape a coherent structure for sharing it (so it can travel beyond Frome)
hold the rural lens: what changes when you’re dispersed, time-poor, and working without urban infrastructure?
turn lived experience into usable resources: recordings, transcripts, and signposted links
In short: we helped translate a rich body of practice into something other rural organisers can pick up and use.
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Getting started
Practical starting points, including:
running an event (without becoming an “event martyr”)
engaging your community (word of mouth, trusted connectors, simple comms)
connecting with your GP surgery
connecting with your local council and county/unitary council
evaluating for impact (in ways that support learning, not just funding)
Around the table conversations
Honest, nuanced discussions about rural realities: what’s tricky, what works, and how people navigate polarisation, capacity, and culture.
Field recordings + deeper dives
Reflections from people doing the work in their places, and longer conversations on movement building and how local action links to wider systems.
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A lot of rural change work, whether that’s environmental or social change, can look very “small” from the outside.
A few people. A village hall. A skittle alley. A Facebook group. A small mailing list. A Tuesday night meeting where someone brings biscuits.
But when you start to knit together those patches of “small” activity across a rural area, the tapestry becomes visible. Tree planting and repair cafés. Food banks and knit-and-natters. Wildflower verges. Community meals. Mutual aid. Local democracy experiments. Tiny acts of care, repeated.
At This Living Place, we have the privilege of seeing a partial bird’s-eye view across Somerset and Dorset. The variety and effort are astounding. Not without challenges, but often outstanding.
Rural places are not lacking care or initiative. What’s often missing is the connective tissue: the shared infrastructure that helps learning travel, reduces wheel-reinvention, and makes it easier to act together.
These resources are one contribution to that infrastructure.
Project Partners
