Convening dialogue, learning and action.

Really Regenerative was set up to be a regenerative bioregional learning centre for Sussex.  Although our work has taken us to many other places in Europe, Asia and South America, our home is still West Sussex.  Our work here is multi-faceted and aims to support the emergence of a more resilient, robust, future-focused culture. It includes:

• Hosting events which build future-focused capacity such as bioregional learning inquiries, showcasing films – National Emergency Briefing is an example, and Places For Life experiences.
• Helping local organisations and individuals build ‘place ‘ready-ness’ to engage in transformative systemic work is determined by the cultural scaffiolding in place.

• Producing studies, reports, responses to collective inquiries, inputs on key issues such as biodiversity, housing, transport, culture and recommendations to statutory bodies such as councils, SDNP etc.

• Supporting community places and spaces, future enterprises, maker spaces, which are unique to our local culture and ecology – and which we can Centres for Life – to emerge here – whether they are social movements or physical entities which culturallly support and exemplify future potential – are essential to encourage other courageous efforts.

• Capacity building in regenerative work through communities of practice, place and system by giving subsidised and free places to Sussex NGOs, activists, communities on our regenerative learning journeys

PREVIOUS EVENTS

CENTRES FOR LIFE, Chichester July 2026

We were invited back to the Festival of Chichester’s Metanioa series of events, hosted by Ben Williams, again this year to build on our Doughnut exploration of 2025.

This year we looked at Centres for Life – the social movements and places which enliven and evolve a culture in a city.  We asked what Centres for Life we had lost, what existed in the city and which could be further enlivened, and which Centres For Life could enable Chichester to move with confidence towards an unstable future in which the polycrisis is changing the many norms we are used to.

We thought these future Centres would be vitally important for us:

• a centre that foregrounds community energy
• a centre that is a home for cultural inclusion
• a way to democratise access to culture and art
• physical centres as ‘homes’ for regenerative, bioregional and energy transition-focused organisations such as Really Regenerative and Transition Towns to give the future a ‘face’ in the city
• a centre that is experiential focused on the future of food – places where people can learn about regenerative organic and high nutrient density food
• centres for maker spaces and creativity

NATIONAL EMERGENCY BRIEFING, May 2026

In May we held a screening of the National Emergency Briefing documentary at the Memorial Hall at the South Downs National Park, in partnership with the Western Sussex Rivers Trust, at which SDNP CEO Sion McGeever and WSRT CEO Aimee Felus also shared some of their work to mitigate the effects of the polycrisis in our region.

After the screening Really Regenerative hosted a workshop to explore what kinds of responses we wanted to work on in  Midhurst and the wider South Downs National Park.

You can read the full response here.

Creating ‘islands of coherence’.

Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine proposed that when complex systems are far from equilibrium, ‘small islands of coherence’ in a sea of chaos, have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order. These pockets of order can influence and eventually reorganize the wider, chaotic environment.

Through curating events, hosting dialogue, testing our new ideas in collective collaboration with institutions, organisations, citizens and more-then-human stakeholders, Really Regenerative tries to play a role as an island of coherence for turbulent times.