Re-Action to ACTionism: From Outdoor Gear to Collective Action

What if the future wasn’t something decided by governments or corporations but something built by us, together, from the ground up?

That’s the question that launched the Re-Action Collective.

We’re a growing community of over 60 organisations and citizen-led initiatives united by a shared belief: we are citizens, not consumers, and the way forward isn't through protest alone, but through demonstration. We’re not just imagining a better future, we're living it, building it, and sharing the blueprint.

Where We Began: Challenging the Outdoor Industry

Our roots are in the outdoors but not in the way you might think.

Re-Action began as a response to a toxic story told by the outdoor industry: that you need shiny, high-tech, expensive gear to access nature. We knew this wasn’t true. We live and work in the outdoors. We’ve hiked, climbed, camped, and surfed without the latest kit. But the industry is stuck in a growth machine driven by shareholder returns and profit margins. That machine is churning out more gear than we need, promoting disposable culture, undermining quality, and telling stories that feed our insecurities.

Worse still, it’s damaging the very places we seek to enjoy.

So in 2022, we said: enough. We founded the Re-Action Collective to tell a new story, one that is citizen-led, community-powered, and values-driven.

What We’re Building: A Citizen-Led Movement

Inspired by a message from the book ‘Citizens', in which Jon Alexander describes how ’a Citizen Future, rooted in the deep truth that all of us are smarter than any of us, is still possible’, we started to find the others. And, in just under three years, we’ve grown from 5 grassroots organisations to a global network of over 60.

We’re multi-faceted because imagining a new future can’t be one-dimensional, and we're deeply collaborative because that future can only be imagined together.

Here’s how we work:

1. The Re-Action Collective (Better Economics)

We’re re-imagining the economy from the ground up beyond consumerism and into community-driven, circular systems. Our members include charities, for profit businesses, social enterprises, and community hubs working on repair, reuse, peer-to-peer lending, redistribution, and ethical entrepreneurship.

The Re-Action Collective is a space of possibility, light on rules, heavy on action. The result is that as a community, from a systems perspective, we’re out innovating entire industries, helping us collectively move beyond this stuck system. Together we’re re-imagining an economy with a focus on well-being, communities and citizens. An economy where our values are not just represented by the things we own.

We're also working on governance and community structure by becoming a sociocracy, a governance model where power is shared, not hoarded. This model distributes leadership, encourages active participation, and creates a resilient structure that can adapt and evolve. The truth is Re-Action is not a charity, limited company. C.I.C. or a not-for-profit, we’re a community operating under our rules. We’re documenting this journey so others can learn and build their own systems of inclusive leadership.

2. Place-Based Action (Beyond Consumerism)

As a community we don’t just talk about change, we show it.

We take our collective re-imagining, the Alternative High Street, a living, breathing example of a citizen-led circular economy on the road to festivals, schools, and towns across the world. Imagine a high street where nothing new is sold, and everything is shared, mended, borrowed or repurposed. Where citizens are at the centre, with real collective agency, real options and real freedoms, that’s the world we’re demonstrating.

We also run campaigns like #CitizenFriday, now in its third year. It flips Black Friday on its head, encouraging people to repair, share, and get out in the fresh air. The campaign has become our weekly ritual, helping us move beyond consumerism. And, it's spreading fast, with businesses, community groups, and citizens joining in across the globe.

3. ACTionism (New Voices)

ACTionism is our storytelling platform turned grassroots movement. It was born out of the realisation that citizens need to see people like themselves making change not just protesting, but doing.

To build this movement we’ve moved beyond outdoor gear to cover the collective action that is taking place across topics such as food, transport, education, community hubs, repair and much more.

ACTionism is a movement built from the ground up, alongside the creative citizens that are doing the work of demonstrating a new system. We convene, listen, practice and act.

We share ideas, stories, guides, and time together (online and at in-person gatherings). We spotlight effective action through a multitude of media, with monthly calls, a magazine, (a soon to be) audio documentary series, the platform ACTionism.space, a newsletter and community film screenings.

Our first film, “ACTionism: The Art of Finding the Others to Take Collective Action”, follows the journey of Ellie Meredith, our 18-year-old apprentice who transformed her climate anxiety into hopeful, practical action. The film has sparked over 100 community screenings and wherever we go, we stay for the conversation. These dialogues are where we see imagination ignite.

And that’s what ACTionism is really about: restoring agency, sparking imagination, and bringing in new, diverse voices especially from communities historically excluded from environmental narratives.

Why We’re Different

We work in emergence. That means we move with what's needed. We respond to community momentum, opportunity, and creativity not five-year plans written in boardrooms. While this makes us adaptive and resilient, it also makes us harder to fund.

Funders often want clearly defined outcomes, KPIs, and logic models. But what we’re doing doesn’t always fit in boxes. It’s real, it’s alive, and it’s deeply rooted in place, people, and possibility.

Still, our impact is clear:

• 60+ organisations working in coordination, not competition
• Tens of thousands of items saved from landfill through repair and reuse
• Hundreds of citizens trained in repair, organising, storytelling, and governance
• A growing movement that puts well-being, interconnection, and citizens at its heart

Where We’re Going

We’ve come a long way on very little. But to continue, we need support.

Our small team Heather Davies, Michele Kaye, Tamasine McCaig, Ellie Meredith and I, have mostly worked voluntarily. We've proven the concept. Now, we need to build capacity, scale our impact, and keep showing what’s possible.

In the next three years, we’ll:

• Expand and support our 60+ member organisations
• Scale the in place demonstrations of the Alternative High Street, and continue to build on the momentum of the Citizen Friday campaign
• Deepen the ACTionism platform: spotlighting more communities, increasing community film screening and community workshops.
• Create a new ACTionism audio documentary series that takes the sounds of collective action into the hearts of communities through a live listening experience, helping to bring new voices to the movement.
• Use storytelling and mapping to demonstrate the breadth of emerging citizen action.
• Complete our sociocratic transition and share the blueprint
• Work with national policy organisations and researchers to influence systemic change

We’re not building a brand. We’re building a movement, one where citizens lead, share, and create the future together. This isn’t just a project. It’s the future being prototyped, by the people who live it every day.

Together, as citizens, we’ve started on an adventure. An adventure that began with outdoor gear, where we quickly found the others, and soon came to understand the power of collective action.

Now, as a community and a movement, the adventure is taking us beyond this story, and into a new world.

Want to Get Involved?

You don’t need to start an organisation to be part of this.

You can host a film screening, run a repair café, join one of our community calls, sign up to the ACTionism newsletter, write an article for the ACTionism platform or simply take part in the next #CitizenFriday.

The future isn’t something we wait for. It’s something we create, together.