Maybe we need to listen.

Maybe the world doesn’t need more ideologies It needs support.
Not another framework or vision our communities need educating into – just support that holds when people are still finding their footing.

I’ve spent years learning that true engagement isn’t about leading a community, it’s about being with them. Every ten years or so, someone new arrives trying to lead instead of listen. But what communities need isn’t leadership in that sense – it’s presence, trust, and time. Engagement is not Comms. It’s not controlling narratives, it’s understanding and sharing the stories that shape the world.

That’s why I make with, not for. Sometimes that means building zoetropes out of farm waste with farmers, watching light flicker through the things that used to be thrown away. Sometimes it means performing a tractor because your friend says all tractors have faces – and you realise he’s right, they do. Other times, it’s just sitting quietly with someone, holding their hand as they turn the pages of a family album.

Being present is my favourite thing. I always assume my collaborators know what I should be doing and when. My role isn’t to arrive with an agenda: it’s to notice what’s already alive and respond to it.

Maybe we don’t need transactional engagement. Maybe what we need are practices that can sustain themselves: where people are seen, heard, and allowed to shape what grows. The artists and practitioner role should not outshine the community themselves and it should be patient, kind and embedded. I bridge conservation engagement with arts based engagement and co creation. Their creation is not material for our own agenda and narratives. No more extraction.

Maybe we need communities not only set their own priorities but keep showing up, from idea stage to wherever their journey lands. Ideas are the easy part, being there and helping people achieve that’s what our calling needs to support. We plant the seeds that we ask others to plant because we are active custodians of community. No more coopting others labour.

Maybe we don’t need forced partnerships but on sustainable trust and clear celebration of communities who are doing the work. As we enter to take off our shoes as we stand in the home of the connectors. Maybe we need remember that non hierarchical thinking means leaving our own notions of what should be done behind and who should be invited to that.

And maybe we don’t need to measure success in numbers that disappear at the end of a funding report. Maybe success is in the moment a community reflects something back: sometimes uncomfortably asking us to really see the impact of our work and that it’s success was down to the community. That discomfort is care. It’s a mirror, not a failure.

So this is my quiet protection: my way of working grows through presence, shared making, and the long patience of relationship.
Because maybe the world doesn’t need ideologies at all.
Maybe it just needs people who are willing to stay.

Maybe it just needs people to listen.

A Working Practice

How I listen. I never know what we will do, it’s a suprise every community is my educator, my teacher and knows best.

I work through trust, rhythm and attention.
Projects begin in conversation – not consultation. I listen for the language people already use to describe their place, their craft, their loss, their hope.

I build through reciprocity – making with, not for. Each gesture, each object, each story is co-shaped by the people it belongs to. The end output is often given up, because the process itself is what matters. It is not about my end product or idea but about the community themselves.

I mentor and share experience. Bringing the process of learning as a collective act of discovery. Not something delivered to us but felt. It is better to feel and experience the world to be closer to it.

I move through relational pace – sometimes fast, often slow. Communities hold many moving parts, and my role is to respond to their timing, not impose my own. I have worked with some communities for over a decade and not just my own.

I hold neurodivergent attention as a gift – the ability to notice pattern, nuance, and energy shifts at speed. That’s not a methodology but a way of being that keeps everything alive and in motion.

And I end, when it’s time, by leaving things stronger than I found them – connected, resourced, and ready to continue without me. Self sustainable and never extractive.