Finding the Others - ACTionism at The Big Retreat Festival

ACTionism has always been a living thing. What started as a documentary, morphed into a magazine and storytelling platform, keeps evolving — shaped by every room it enters, every conversation it sparks, every person who discovers that they are not as alone in their caring as they thought. Each one creates a ripple that spreads and amplifies the power of finding the others.

But we're seeing that 'Finding the others' isn't as simple as it sounds - so we're experimenting with ways to make this simpler for people, first up by taking some ACTionism ripples to The Big Retreat Festival in South Wales.

New Workshop - ACTionism: The Art of Finding the Others

Tamasine and Olivia will be running some newly developed ACTionism workshops in Darwin's Den over the weekend. The workshop, which calling ACTionism: The Art of Finding the Others — is built around the idea that most of us care deeply about the world around us, but somewhere between caring and doing, something gets in the way. Life. Doubt. Not knowing where to start or who to start with.

The workshop will explore the idea that the key to fixing things has always been in all of us, and yet for many of us, the biggest blocker to taking action is not whether we care. It is that we are out of practice at being in community.

Most of us simply do not know how to start.

We don't know how to:
> find the people who share our concerns,
> begin a conversation that matters
> move from a good chat to something that actually changes things.

So, that is what we are going to practise together.

We want everyone to leave the tent having met new people, with a clearer sense of what has been holding them back from acting in their own communities, and at least one concrete action to carry forward.

Re-Action Collective Workshops at The Big Retreat

Alongside the ACTionism workshops, we're joining the Re-Action Collective in Darwin's Den for the full weekend as part of their #CitizenFriday workshops - the tent will be open so people can drop in, make something, learn a skill, and contribute to a growing collective artwork that Gav is coordinating under the theme Imagine the Future.

We're excited to see Joanne Cooke from Revive and Revolve running hands-on repair workshops in darning and invisible mending, and Rebecca Evans leading StitchHikes, and of course, Gavin and Heather, who founded Re-Action. The whole weekend will close with an awesome celebration of collective action- unfurling the collective artwork banner as a shared vision of what is possible when we find each other.

So if you're coming along to Pembrokeshire at the end of May, do come and find us in Darwin's Den - and if not, but you'd like to find out more about workshops like these, have a read here.