Welcome to my site.
First off, two questions…
- Do you want to contribute to the resilience of communities and localities through your community or professional activities?
- Do you want to contribute to the resilience of communities and localities through your walking, cycling and paddling activities?
If you answered yes to either (or both), you’re in the right place.
“My site is a gateway to learning, sharing experiences and collaborating with others who, like us, have a focus on supporting community-focused sustainable futures through our actions.
There are three threads that shape my work and the site. Together, these threads form my practice. It’s one based on care: care for place, for people, and for the future. These threads offer more than a framework. They offer us ways of supporting localities, sustainabilities and transformations. Each are vital in their own right, but it is their interweaving that makes them powerful tools for building sustainable, resilient futures.
- community-led resilient futures which focus on the role communities have in developing their own resilient and sustainable futures. Community resilience focuses on how people collectively adapt, recover, and thrive in the face of change. It’s not about returning to what was, but about understanding what is and what could be. It depends on relationships, trust, and shared purpose.
- LoST forms of travel (landscapes of stories and time) that focus on walking, cycling and paddling. LoST grounds us in place. It challenges conventional travel by fostering slow, attentive movement that honours local knowledge, ecosystems and cultural continuity. It’s a way of travelling in landscapes, not just through them.
- The importance of having deep conversations for lasting, sustainable change. Deep conversations are the connective tissue. They are how we listen, learn, and build meaning together. Without them, resilience becomes technical, and travel becomes surface-level.
Those three words are important: Localities. Sustainabilities. Transformations – LST. Making these words meaningful with the complexities ‘on the ground’ is where I focus. Communities are lead actors in shaping sustainable and resilient futures andtransformations to these futures are possible through creative collaboration where we all have a part to play. Ultimately, local transformations ripple out to wider transformations and diverse options for sustainable futures beyond the local. You’ll see the importance of LST throughout my work, practice and education.
Under the LST banner, you can find:
- LST Collaboration – an on-line Hub focused on sharing a diversity of ideas, experiences and insights from those working or wanting to work, with communities to support resilience through our actions.
- LST Learning, where I work with individuals, groups and organisations to provide highly tailored opportunities for deep learning in LST principles for those supporting communities through their actions.
- LoST Travel, where the intersection of LST ideals and our interests in travel that is focused on understanding more about landscapes and their stories is explored, to move travel to have specific contributions to make to resilient, sustainable communities and landscapes. There’s a particular focus on activities such as trekking, cycling and paddling as well as on our role as LoST travellers.
- LST Advice, where you can benefit from my professional experience.
What’s the foundation for all this? I call it Conversations with Communities (CwC). Conversations are ways we all share experiences, toss ideas around and learn. Communities and their localities, such as landscapes, are inter-dependent so our conversations are a collaboration with a community and a locality – a collaboration that reflects social, economic, political, cultural, historical and natural processes. Having conversations with people uncovers the links between sustainable, resilient localities and sustainable, resilient communities. Because conversations are two-way, we also get to reflect on our own ideas, actions and travels with others.
THE CORE OF MY WORK
Ever since I started working with communities using the LST framework, I’ve focused on sharing experiences and ideas. My work continually reminds me that there are no simple blueprints for change, just complexities to navigate. Recognising this and sharing experiences and ideas allows us to understand more about these complexities and work a way through them to ensure LST outcomes – we get beyond the blueprint.
“Explore some more through these pages or by joining the LST Collaboration Hub. It will be launched soon.
My start and end point? People.
I’ve been fortunate to have worked with amazing young people, women and men who have contributed to the sustainability of their communities, their landscapes and our futures. They are important reminders that, given opportunities, we are all able to engage with issues of resilience and resilient, sustainable landscapes – we all have contributions to make.
Have a look around my site and get in touch. You can get in touch/stay in touch a few different ways. You can join the LST Collaboration Hub via the ‘LST Collaboration’ page. Or you can follow me on insta, where I use #LSTpeopleandplace, #LSTconversationswithcommunities and #LSTcommunitiesandresilience for posts specifically focused on communities and landscapes.
It’d be great to start some conversations.
