Wilderness Centre
The Centre considers itself a ‘home from home’ for its main visitors, younger school children, and sees itself as contributing to ‘flourishing lives’.
We have introduced regenerative thinking to the Centre so that it now sees itself as nested ‘within its place’, rather than simply being an outdoor learning centre that offers fun and challenging experiences. For the last four years it has been unfolding the potential of the 32 acres of nature it sits upon, including 5 acres of ancient forest.
Dartmoor ponies have been brought in to roam the fields, cattle do ‘conservation grazing’, wild boar that used to be seen as a nuisance, and as causing ‘damage’ are now welcomed for the seeds they surface for the wildflower meadows as they forage. Insect and bird life has soared. New hedgerows guide pine martins, stoats and weasels across the land as they continue their passage across the landscape. An extensive permaculture market garden is at the planning stage.
Bringing nature to life once more has added to the value offer of the business: children are growing ecoliteracy skills through a new quality of interaction with nature. While planting hedgerows for example, they are beginning to understand the unique role we have as humans in bringing ecosystems back to health. The schools rebook as soon as they leave. The children take new capabilities back to their school, their community, and to their families.
The local Council has taken notice, and can see the value in the Wilderness. If the region, the Forest of Dean is to transition to a new green, local and regenerative economy, then this will likely require the whole community to grow its ecoliteracy.
With the Council’s encouragement, the business has formed a Community Benefit Society to support this wider role. It has attracted considerable funding to buy the site from foundations enthusiastic about supporting so-called ‘bioregional’ projects, in our case, a learning centre that will do its bit towards reconnecting ‘bio’ (nature) and ‘region’ (our human geography which often takes for granted the land we live on).
Because it is also a living case study of a business on its regenerative journey, we also run a Regenerative Leadership course here at the Wilderness. Please see the ‘What We Offer’ tab and get in touch if you’d like to know more.
We cut our teeth with Kate Raworth’s pioneering work on Doughnut Economics while supporting a cross community group in Devon seeking to create a ‘Doughnut for Devon.’
We now bring the Doughnut to businesses keen to explore how they can make their contribution to a regenerative and distributive economy.
We offer an action-oriented workshop that is practical but ambitious focusing on the deep design of business. We begin with an exercise to introduce ‘living systems’ thinking to help business leaders find their compass to navigate the transition from our existing extractive paradigm to the new paradigm of regenerative business.
The workshop invites companies to engage in a transformative agenda of becoming regenerative and distributive in their strategies, operations, and impacts, so that they help to bring humanity into the Doughnut.
Central to the tool is the concept of enterprise design. This is explored through five design layers: a company’s Purpose, Networks, Governance, Ownership, and Finance.
These design layers powerfully shape the strategic decisions and operational impacts of businesses, and ultimately determine whether or not businesses can transform to become part of a regenerative and distributive future. By diving into five layers of deep design, this tool reveals both design blockages that prevent transformative action, and design innovations that can unlock its possibility.
Here's a short video to introduce the concept of enterprise design.
Bringing the Doughnut to Business
River Avon Bioregion: connecting to ‘place’
This initiative is focused on groups and organisations of all kinds along the length of the River Avon from its source in Wiltshire in the West of England, along the 83 miles of its length to where it meets the sea close to Bristol.
It starts with a question: what happens to the nature of our work if we
•slow down
• bring ourselves into greater connection with ourselves, and with Nature;
• into connection with how our communities here have evolved with Nature through time
• reflect together on the patterns that have brought the place prosperity
Could this reveal a meaningful potential for the region that we haven’t yet tapped into - which would help us to respond to the challenges of now? Could this show a path towards a more equal and regenerative economy? Finally, could we find a new or expanded role for our work within this new story of potential that would inspire us and those we serve?
We are piloting the pilgrimage at the moment. Contact us if you’d like to join this journey.
