● Working With Us
Practical support for organisations, businesses, funders, and networks
As part of our commitment to sharing our learning and practices far and wide, alongside our grant-funded projects, This Living Place works with funders, founders, businesses, organisations and networks who recognise that the world is changing and that new ways of thinking, organising and working together are needed.
We help individuals and teams understand what’s emerging from the grassroots, strengthen their impact, and develop practical, innovative and creative responses.
Over the past two years, we’ve been building This Living Place from the ground up, working directly with communities, young people, local organisations, landworkers, artists, funders and place-based practitioners.
We’re now opening up a small number of partnership opportunities for aligned organisations who want to learn with us, draw on our practical experience, and work differently.
Why We Exist
We can help if you are asking:
How do we understand what people and places really need?
We bring grounded insight from working directly in communities, helping you understand emerging needs, opportunities and challenges, and translate them into practical action.
How do we create deeper and more meaningful impact?
We help organisations uncover where they can have the greatest influence, identify missed opportunities, break down silos, and develop strategies that create lasting value for the people and places they care about.
How do we learn, adapt and stay relevant in rapidly changing times?
We help teams capture learning, spot emerging patterns, share knowledge effectively and turn insight into action, enabling more confident and adaptive decision-making.
How do we bring people together around a shared challenge, opportunity or vision?
We design and facilitate gatherings, learning spaces, peer networks and collaborative processes that build trust, strengthen relationships and unlock collective action.
How do we connect big-picture ambitions with local reality?
We help organisations think strategically and systemically without losing sight of the practical realities, relationships and conditions that shape change on the ground.
How do we create space for imagination, innovation and new possibilities?
The challenges we face cannot be solved by repeating what we’ve always done. We help organisations create space for reflection, creativity and future thinking, exploring new approaches to community-led change.
Ways we work
Learning Partner: Supporting programmes, portfolios and partnerships to capture learning, reflect, adapt and act on emerging insight.
Place-Based Programme Design: Helping funders and organisations shape initiatives that work with the realities of community life, local capacity and place.
Grantee Learning & Peer Networks: Convening funded or partnered
organisations to share learning, build trust and strengthen collective capacity.
Participatory Research & Community Insight: Bringing grounded perspectives, practitioner experience and community intelligence into strategy and programme design.
Strategic Reflection & Critical Friendship: Working with teams and leaders to navigate complexity, challenge assumptions and think differently.
Workshops, Facilitation & Convening: Designing and facilitating gatherings, away days, learning sessions, community conversations and strategy processes.
Or a mix of all the above!
What makes us different
We are not a traditional consultancy.
Our learning comes from actively building and testing place-based work ourselves. We are working on the ground with our communities, and learning alongside a national movement, developing youth pathways, supporting community ownership, convening peer networks, designing local projects and learning in real time.
That means we don’t just bring theory. We bring live practice, honest insight and an understanding of what it feels like to do this work with limited resources, complex local dynamics and real community relationships at stake.
What we are currently exploring
Community-led transformation
Rural leadership and youth pathways
Place-based funding and philanthropy
Community ownership and stewardship
Local economies and wealth flows
Peer learning networks
Participatory research
Storytelling and narrative change
Community resilience and adaptation
Learning infrastructure between places
The role of imagination and future visioning
Learning infrastructure between places
How communities build agency in times of uncertainty and change
Examples from our work
Generation Rural: Creating meaningful pathways for young people to contribute to local economies and community-led change.
Living Places Network: Building peer learning infrastructure for place-based practitioners across the UK.
Stalbridge / The Gugg: Supporting community ownership, local agency, storytelling and long-term place-based transformation.
Dorset Retrofit Reimagined: Designing participatory events and learning spaces around retrofit, community need and local climate action.
This Living Place brings together a team with a rare combination of grassroots practice and systems-level experience.
We are community organisers, facilitators, storytellers, researchers and strategists who are actively working in our own places, supporting local projects, building community relationships and testing new approaches to change in real time.
Alongside this, our team has experience supporting national and international networks, major funding programmes, movement-building initiatives, community engagement processes and systems change work. We have worked across philanthropy, food systems, rural development, community ownership, environmental action, communications and narrative change.
What connects us is a commitment to learning through practice. We don’t just advise on community-led change, we are actively trying to do it ourselves.
This means we bring a combination of grounded local insight, practical delivery experience, strategic thinking and long-term systems perspectives that is rarely found in one team.
Who you’ll work with
Partnership models
We can work through:
one-off workshops or team days
short pieces of consultancy
facilitation and convening support
learning partner roles
embedded monthly support
programme design and development
peer learning network design
strategic advisory or critical friendship
If you are a funder, organisation, business, founder or network exploring how you can have more positive impact in these turbulent times, we’d love to talk.
Everything on this page is just an idea; we are flexible and adaptable and, most importantly, open to mission-aligned work.
Get in touch: laura@thislivingplace.co.uk
