Part 2 — Networks and Movement Building
Connecting Hope for Alternative Futures
Tracing how networks help connect and unite UK practitioners into a transformative movement
Unveiling a movement for alternative futures
This is the second essay in a series of four that we are releasing concurrently and which explore the ideas, evolution and findings of an experimental piece of research that Onion Collective undertook through the course of 2024. Supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, it aimed to uncover and understand the network of practitioners working for alternative futures in the UK today. The first essay explored transition models and metaphor as context for that work, and proposed a different way of looking at systems transformation; this second essay examines the power of social networks in creating new worlds and explores an ecosystem ‘map’ of the UK’s alternative future practitioners. Essay three, which follows, explores what these new world builders look and sound like, estimating the scale of the network and unearthing values and practice. Finally, the fourth essay in the series shines a light on funding and philanthropy and its role in supporting or suppressing how new possibilities emerge, evolve, and unfurl. Further detail about the authors, the methodology and ethical considerations can be found here.
“My post capitalist, anti-colonial, anarchic dialectic brings all the boys to the yard”¹
Onion Collective didn’t set out to be post capitalist. A decade and a half ago, our work was born from a desire to simply do things better locally: to hold space for a neglected community; to create enterprising jobs and a place for young people to be creative; to enable artists to make and show work; and to find purpose in employment. Mainly, it was about being the people who did something rather than complaining about how someone else should. To slightly misquote Brian Eno, you don’t have to start a revolution, but you do have to start building something else.²
Inevitably, doing so became something of a political act. We knew we would have to fight for our right to determine our land use, to prioritise social purpose and the arts and to stop an outside organisation coming in and extracting profit from the town, when all of that potential could be used for the good of the local community. Ours is an against-all-odds story of local people (mostly women — or mothers, as every single journalist interested in our story has been at pains to point out) beating a private company to take on land — but having to fight at every turn, pay over the odds, justify ourselves endlessly, battle relentless sexism and hawk back rage while being belittled and bullied. In practice, as we confronted the system, we were fighting for a different kind of economy, but we were several years away from articulating one.
And we were not alone.
As we spent the following decade putting the plans together for East Quay, in our rugged, beautiful but undervalued, coastal corner of Somerset, other organisations peppered across the country were doing similar. Like us, they were rehearsing, or realising something different in the places they cared deeply about, while reading Jonathan Porrit, Naomi Klein, Rob Hopkins and John Grey; feeling rage for Jess Steele and the Hastings community as they lost their pier from community ownership, and joy at Incredible Edible’s fierce agency and fearless dismissal of the need for permissions. These were practitioners sharing NEF’s happy planet index, screening The Power of Community (How Cuba Survived Peak Oil), and starting to articulate that other things mattered more than growth, while gently pulling together a meta narrative for something else.
In niches everywhere, ideas and examples of an alternative social, economic and political future to the one we were currently living in were being quietly conceived and constructed, across hundreds of pockets of forgotten space.
And now, as we begin 2025, these niches are connecting up. A diverse and hope-affirming ecosystem of practitioners, working to build this alternative future in the UK is taking shape — a future that rejects the extractive premise of late-stage capitalism; that reconnects people to the planet and each other; that gives prominence to previously oppressed voices and fights for the agency of all. From community builders of civic infrastructure to artists challenging possibilities to architects re-wiring land systems, the mix of activities, capabilities, skill-sets and visions for how things could tangibly and plausibly be different is powerful and mobilising. In his 2017 book, How to Thrive in the Next Economy, john thackara recognised this undercurrent on a global scale. ‘This movement’, he tells us, ‘is below the radar of mainstream media, but it contains a million active groups — and rising. Quietly, for the most part, communities the world over are growing a replacement economy from the ground up.’³
This essay will explore this exhilarating notion, reflecting mapping work we have carried out of practitioners of alternative futures within the UK. Having a map means we can begin to navigate this ecosystem and in the process, create new pheromone pathways and strengthen links between them; we can accelerate the work to make us more than the sum of our parts, and to turn this whispering vanguard into a powerful movement for change.
Mapping the movement: method and purpose
The work began in early 2024, with Onion Collective being commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) to carry out a piece of research to explore the extent to which funding was reaching those practitioners building an emerging new world in the UK today. Specifically, they came in pursuit of answers to two central questions: who is working to build alternative, just, regenerative futures in the UK at present and who is funding that work, with a hypothesis that this is an ‘under-funded’ area of practice.
We knew from a decade on the ground in this field, that the work tends to be emergent practice, by emergent organisations, who are often experimenting. A substantial amount of this type of work also inevitably takes place in the margins of ‘usual’ activity, meaning it is, at least partially, hidden from easy view. The work is also riddled with sensitivities and potential for harm, while being masked by layers of invisibility, from conscious stealth to structural oppression. This is a field of work where opacity is often a necessity: where practitioners might fear being labelled as radicals or be tired from decades of abuse, or centuries of intergenerational colonial praxis. In more practical terms too, the hypothesis we were testing made it likely we were looking for poorly resourced organisations, making them harder to find.⁴ We therefore needed a way to find the organisations hidden in secluded corners, and to do so with care. We determined to use a relational mapping toolkit, similar in nature to another project we run, called Understory, which maps place-based social capital (and in partnership again with our friends at the amazing design studio, Free Ice Cream) that would ask those inside the movement to name others they felt to be doing this work. We proposed a snowball approach, which we would run over several sessions, with those named in one session invited to take part in a later session and so on.
Networks as drivers of change
In growing a movement, connections are king. They impact how we behave, think and feel.
Fascinating research by Fowler and Christakis has shown how behaviour, and emotions, are contagious. Their work has shown how both loneliness and happiness spread through a network: for example, if you are directly connected to someone who is lonely then you are 52 percent more likely to be lonely yourself. By two degrees of separation that reduces to 25 percent, and by three degrees, to 15 percent.⁵ Similarly, multiple studies point to the nature of social relationships being particularly important for transmission in a network. A lovely example relates to the spread of yawns. The better we know someone, the more likely it is that we will catch their yawn. The transmission time is also faster, with a smaller delay between yawns among family members than among acquaintances.⁶ This is reflected in how transition models treat relationships as vital tools: both the two loops model and our petal model⁷ point to the importance of connections within and beyond our immediate fields in explaining how the pioneers of new approaches join together as a network and form communities of practice to replace the old system; therein becoming a movement.
Network visualisation software helps us to understand the shape of a network of connections and is designed to place those who are more interconnected in the centre and those who are less interconnected at the periphery. A healthy map has a dense centre and wide reach and is weak with either missing. Network theory tells us that to grow influence or a movement, we need both weak and strong ties working together. Strong ties bind individuals together into groups, but weak ties bind groups together into the larger society and are crucial for the spread of information outwards. As Fowler and Christakis point out, ‘we might trust socially distant people less, but the information and contacts they have may be intrinsically more valuable because we cannot access them ourselves’.⁸ Their research shows that while the flow of information may stop at three degrees of separation, we often start our search for information two or three degrees away in order to make sure we are learning something new.⁹ Weak ties in many directions mean new information and ideas continue to flow in both directions and we avoid becoming stuck in an echo chamber.
Where we are now: observations from the map
The map of alternative future practitioners that we have gathered, pictured below in anonymised form (with funders and infrastructure bodies removed, except where they play dual roles), shows a small but dense nucleus, to the middle of the picture with connections branching out in all directions.
Despite all the quiet busyness up and down the country, our map depicts a movement that is still nascent, in the relatively early stages of coming together. Beyond the small centre, it isn’t tightly bound; in fact one of the most extraordinary findings was that the vast majority of organisations only have one single connection in. The map’s centre is made up mainly of the Pathfinders¹⁰ (plus a few notable others), and funders (though obviously not in the above version where they have already been removed). Removing either or both of these groups changes the shape of the map substantially, taking with them almost all the network density, as shown below.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the two most connected organisations in the map are both funders, with 75 and 65 connections respectively — and this is an interesting point when the network appears relatively nascent in terms of developing communities of practice. It appears to be a movement rich in people doing deep, revolutionary work, but only in the early stages of building the internal relationships that add the resilience and power needed to forge a new world. Beyond the small centre, the network currently disperses quickly, reinforcing that to a very great degree, we are all periphery. Supporting and resourcing the development of these kinds of real-life networks through field-building work is a critical role identified in the transitional literature. As Gal Beckerman argues, ‘activists need spaces to come together in the quiet when revolutions are only impassioned conversations among the aggrieved and dreaming. Because without those spaces, we risk a future in which the possibility of new realities will remain just beyond our grasp.’¹¹
Through its Pathfinder programme and associated works, JRF is seeking to develop a meaningful understanding of this terrain, and in just two years, amplification has been enormous. As Pathfinders, we have been resourced, brought together in monthly meetings, taken away together, and given the space to think, collectively, about the labour. Indeed, this research is a consequence. For this cohort, it hasn’t just been about working together but about sharing and advancing knowledge from each of our own networks, reducing myopia, and understanding and realising our collective power — and this understanding can now pulse out into the wider network, which can reflect and bring new ideas back in.
We are an ecosystem made conscious.
The influence of the Pathfinders is clearly visible in the map, but it is impossible to disentangle the resourcing of the Pathfinders cohort by JRF as an influence on the connectedness of those organisations (indeed this was part of the intent), which does seem to have worked. It is equally impossible to disentangle from the fact that JRF selected these organisations in part because they appeared to be well-connected and relational. But what the map does show is both that this network of organisations exhibits a density of ties to one another, and that each of these organisations has a wide reach beyond the Pathfinder cohort, so the map branches out in many directions to a wide selection of organisations, knowledge and ideas. It is also worth noting (and is reassuring in terms of understanding), that there are perhaps 10 or so other organisations whose connectedness in the map are on a par with many of the Pathfinders despite not being in that resourced cohort. Regardless of the counterfactual, what the map appears to show is both the distorting power of funders, and also the immense value of resourcing the ecosystem in this way, as it seems to have given the network a stronger nucleus which is helping to seed or give impetus to a relational movement.¹²
This implies the great potential of funding and enabling bodies in supporting the ecosystem. In total, just shy of 260 organisations were named as enablers — shown here in purple (either solid or not).¹³
Of the ‘enablers’ around a quarter were also funders, ranging from the Emergence Foundation to Partners for a New Economy. Other ‘enablers’ ranged from network organisations such as the Transitions Towns Network and Circular Communities Scotland to advocacy bodies such as Culture Declares Emergency and Black Lives Matter to research centres and organisations such as the Agroecology Learning Collective and Nesta. Many of these infrastructure-type organisations, from Rising Quo to the Good Ancestors Movement, just like many of the practitioners identified, play multiple and cross-cutting roles, at the edges of philanthropy, movement-building, knowledge production and delivery.
The bridging and linking capital of funders and other infrastructure organisations remains in large degree still hypothetical (as shown by the legginess of the map) but what stands out is the scale of the potential contained by such a large and rich array of organisations with a role in the ecosystem of practitioners. How they work to strengthen and grow the ecosystem of alternative practitioners, supporting organisations with financial resources, intellectual foundations, and collaborative impetus, could be key to unlocking larger scale shifts.
Complex contagions for growth and resilience
With this in mind, it’s worth looking to network science for some further guidance on how that ecosystem might expand, and there’s an important lesson in how complex contagions happen; after all, creating an alternative future is not just passing on yawns. In his 2020 book, Contagion, Kucharski tells us how: ‘small-world networks might help diseases spread, [but] these same networks could limit the transmission of complex contagions… From social networks to protests, new ideas are often more appealing if people have already adopted them.’¹⁴ This means that the spread of alternative futures work is unlikely to pass through single links, even if they are close connections; instead it requires multiple transmission routes. Furthermore, Kucharski tells us ‘people are more likely to believe in something if they get confirmation from several sources.’¹⁵ At present though, as the map shows, most organisations named quite separate groups of connections. This means there is work that could be done to ‘close the triangles’ of the network, i.e, to connect up those named organisations with each other, so that the network develops the resilience of a spider’s web rather than continuing in siloed pathways.
Complex contagion is about intellectual as well as personal connections. The connections holding together the ecosystem revealed in our map are as much about enticing ideas as they are direct relationships — often shared through blogs, books and social media. These methods of sharing have the power to leapfrog normal network links, making us feel connected to organisations we have no actual relationship with. Indeed, we mapped both actual relationships between practitioners, and these less tangible connections where we are simply inspired by another organisation’s work. While each organisation had a series of organisations they have relationships with, they each also had a similar-sized list of organisations they knew to be doing this work that they were inspired by. While the research around yawns would suggest we need close relationships to enable the spread of contagions, these non-relational connections are also important for adding links in the spread of complex ideas.
The movement also benefits from validation within the existing paradigm (for example, Kate Raworth and her Doughnut Economics model — she lectures at the University of Oxford, and her best selling book is published by Penguin), which combats disconfirmation bias — the idea that you need much stronger arguments to persuade people who do not already share your vision. The combination of multiple embodied practitioners with a collective narrative, supported by an externally-validated macro economic theory, is powerful. It was therefore a clever move of JRF to invite the Doughnut Economics Action Lab into the Pathfinder cohort to make this source of widely-accepted, inspirational theory part of the movement’s core (though the action lab is of course the practical and embodied manifestation of that theory). Doing so reduced the number of connections many of the organisations in the network needed to leapfrog to get to them. Funders should take note of this powerful work, and we must ask them to do more to leverage their relational power and begin to truly connect up the network, enabling these complex ideas to forge multiple pathways out to each actor.
Protecting a porous periphery
At the same time, any such efforts demand we are all conscious of the power that comes with intervention and resourcing and mindful of ways in which self-organised connectivity can be supported. There are other potential pitfalls too. Through a series of experiments, published in the journal Nature Communications, Guilbeault et al showed the power of groupthink as scale grows.¹⁶ Their research found that in moving from small groups to large, the predictability of respondents increased; so when more than a third of participants advocated for something, they found the whole group was likely to adopt it. This understanding feels essential if we are to create a competing narrative to extractive late stage capitalism, but requires caution when you consider the ways ideas from the margins could be suppressed. Research also shows for example, that ‘if high profile scientists dominate a field, it can hinder the growth of competing ideas.’ ¹⁷As such, we must always remain mindful of the importance of the periphery, making sure we get beyond the centre, to pick up new tracks and hidden alleys to alternative futures. When we started Understory, our place-based relational mapping project, we were really interested in the maps’ super connectors, and it took us a while to realise that finding and understanding the least connected people could be just as interesting. New people or organisations at the edges bring new ideas and energy and challenge and disrupt power systems, which is just as important as the role played by those who are holding the network together and spreading their knowledge throughout it. This is another reason that we continue to resist the focus on defining edges or finding boundaries — it implies a value judgement about where in the network one sits, which is unjustified and has potential unintended consequences.
While we are all outsiders now, only just emerging as a networked force, against an infinitely stronger, dominant regime, it is essential that this new movement stays true to its foundational ideas of mutuality and shared ownership. This will be a process of iterative growth, so as the nucleus gains power, it needs those connections out to also be connections in; to remain open to two-way discourse and learning from and with the newly-reached margins and to avoid becoming an echo chamber. A network with a firm boundary or hard edge will not continue to grow and we must therefore remain cognisant of the risk that as the network’s consciousness increases, it could lose some of its nuance, and the multiplicity of voices that this new world so desperately needs.
This concern interplays with a related one about co-option, raising questions about how to tell somehow if an organisation is authentically part of the movement or rather appropriating its contacts and ideas for some other regime-propping-up reason (whether intentionally or otherwise). Indeed, a large part of the narrative around horizon 2 in the three horizons model, for example, is to explore how the prevailing paradigm acts to capture or co-opt new ideas in support of its own dominance (see the adoption of the language of ‘sustainability’ for example). One of the things that our research revealed (and which is discussed in more detail in the next essay in the series) was that practitioners tend to be rapidly defining and redefining the language they use, in no small part because of a perceived need to ‘stay ahead of the game’ — to constantly adapt language in response to its co-option by parts of the prevailing paradigm (as anticipated by the H2 transition line). This is a legitimate concern: we have all witnessed many examples where indigenous wisdom or liberatory action of those at the margins in our communities, perhaps most especially people of colour, has been swept up, parroted and preached by those within the prevailing regime who have no real intent to change the rules of the game or seek shifts in power. The reasons to resist such behaviour are multiple, from the obvious injustice if acknowledgement is not given where it is due, the continued oppression that occurs under a regime co-opting alternatives to its own ends; and because in a context of scarcity, it risks diverting funds and support from the emergent niches who need the quiet spaces in which to grow their agency.
But while we must resist appropriation, we must take care not to close off the possibility of contagion in the process. The deeper change we need is in the submerged layers of language, metaphor, mindset and modes of knowledge.
In part, that we are fearful reflects how the prevailing paradigm treats knowledge. Following its intractable logic, under capitalism knowledge is money. It is commodified, competitive, marketised; it is hierarchical, colonial, patriarchal and subject to gatekeeping and exploitation. The treatment of knowledge in the future we seek looks different. Since knowledge is power even more than it is money, to shift power structures, it must be distributed not hoarded — open source, co-created, shared. Other ways of knowing offer us not just intellectual challenge but growth and liberation (everyone should read James Bridle’s incredible book Ways of Being on the need to reframe knowledge).¹⁸ This means digging deep to reject anxiety about authenticity. To maintain that concern may reflect a hierarchical, rational approach to knowledge that risks artificially constraining the field, may risk excluding some practitioners even as it attempts to shield others, and may even provide fodder for co-option or appropriation.
Reclaiming and reframing language to build momentum
Instead, use of language perhaps offers a route to invert co-option in favour of paradigm change. Research shows, as we know intuitively, that people are far more persuasive when they tailor their argument to the moral values of their opponent. Thus if you want to persuade a conservative, you’re better off focusing on ideas like patriotism and community, whereas a liberal will be more convinced by messages promoting fairness.¹⁹ With this in mind, rather than constantly redefining our own language (which works against the imperative of powerful storytelling to narrate a collective, embodied message of something better), can we reclaim some of the language previously hi-jacked? ‘Radical’, for example, originally meant rootedness, fundamental, essential, not extreme. And the essence of growth is inherently entangled, generative and cyclical, rather than linear, extractive and perpetually upward. If our politicians could begin to reframe the language of growth in these terms, with fallow periods, decline and renewal built in, the mindset shift looks more achievable. It turns confirmation bias in favour of the change that is sought. To quote James Bridle: ‘A culture of binary language splits us in two, and makes us choose which parts of ourselves fit existing power structures.’²⁰
In all these ways of contagion, the story begins to change. The history of movement building, along with our own experiences and anecdotal observation, suggest that much alternative futures work emerges at the margins of society, ‘in the small, secluded corners where a vanguard can whisper among themselves, imagine alternate realities, and deliberate over how to get there’.²¹ And as we explored in the first essay in this series, it is also in the spaces where the current economy doesn’t work; the places where community hasn’t been so ravaged by capitalism that the imagination and appetite for something better is both a possibility and a necessity. As Rebecca Solnit writes, it is in these neglected edges that radical power lies. It is there and in their circuitous roots to the centre that these new ideas cease to be new as they become the script for the regime actors on the main stage, who come to believe they wrote them.²²
We are on the precipice of all this now: actors embodying the work in multiple pockets across the country, with their voices combined and amplified, leapfrogging traditional relational connection routes through social media, Medium and Substack, with all the thinking backed up by externally validated theories. We must work to ensure that as more and more organisations emerge into the ecosystem the script keeps evolving, the edges remain porous, and the ideas and practices unfurl and flow, so that in the end we can co-opt everyone to the dream of an alternative, just, and regenerative future.
Looking ahead: understanding ecosystem practices
In our next essay in this series, we explore what our research has told us about the scale of the ecosystem operating in the UK today, and types of organisations that make it up exploring their practices, ways of working and the kinds of values that underpin them.
About the Authors
This essay has been co-authored by Jessica Prendergrast and Sally Lowndes of Onion Collective. The research that led to it was made possible with support of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and using the technology and insight of sam howey nunn and Simon Johnson of Free Ice Cream.
We are hugely grateful to all those who have helped us by participating in the research, reading these essays, offering challenge and encouragement.
Thanks to Georgie Grant for her beautiful illustrations.
Please do get in contact.
About Onion Collective CIC
Onion Collective (OC) is a place-based social enterprise located in the small coastal town of Watchet in Somerset, from where we work to reconfigure economics from the perspective of our attachments to community, culture, nature and the future we hope for. By demonstrating alternative economic delivery, inviting cultural imagination and building civic infrastructure for transition we are re-writing the story of what is possible in an isolated community. We believe that change is pioneered at the periphery and that if things can be different here, they can be different anywhere; securing a future for us all that delivers agency, hope, solidarity and belonging.
About Free Ice Cream
Free Ice Cream design playful participation for the public realm, digital spaces and civic processes. From re-imagined futures to alternative infrastructures, their methods put people at the centre. The Relational Mapping Toolkit behind the project and the Understory platform both evolved from a game they developed for the UN Sustainable Development conference in Bonn in 2017, during which participants could play and trade Sustainable Development Goals policy interventions to better understand how interconnected complexities played out over time.
- This quote, now found on mugs and t-shirts, intentionally appropriates the title line of the famous Kelis song from 2003, My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. It makes the point, discussed later in this essay, about how language spreads, is adopted, adapted and co-opted to new uses, imbued with popular culture and finding unexpected outlets.
- Quoted from this podcast in which Eno and Clare Farrell discuss their shared commitment to mobilising change in the face of climate emergency, under the banner of an emergent movement called HardArt.
- John Thackara. How to Thrive in the Next Economy: Designing Tomorrow’s World Today. 2016. p.8.
- The Civic Power Fund recently undertook a similar piece of research that looked at social justice grant making in the UK, but was able to start with the supply side of funders and look at who they funded as a way to identify practitioners. For our research of an ill-funded field, such an approach would necessarily miss many organisations in their entirety.
- Nickolas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of our Social Networks and How they Shape our Lives, New York, NY, 2009.
- Adam Kucharski, The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread — and Why They Stop, London: Profile Books, Ltd, 2020.
- See essay one for an explanation of our petal model of transition.
- Nickolas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of our Social Networks and How they Shape our Lives, New York, NY, 2009.
- Ibid.
- The Pathfinders are a funded and networked cohort of alternative futures practitioners, including Onion Collective, that have been convened by JRF. For more on this, see the Methods paper.
- Gal Beckerman, Radical Ideas Need Quiet Spaces, New York Times, 10th February 2022.
- As explained at the start of this piece, the research is anonymous, in order to protect the movement, thus we cannot reveal the names of the additional 10, but it is important to say that we would not feel comfortable doing that anyway, as it risks carrying a value judgement that could distort funding. Being better connected does not mean an organisation is doing better work, it may simply be a reflection of privilege.
- The others shown here are all funding organisations named by participants as providing grant support but not as enablers.
- Adam Kucharski, The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread — and Why They Stop, London: Profile Books, Ltd, 2020.
- Ibid.
- Cited by Michael Blanding in The power of groupthink: Study shows why ideas spread in social networks, February 8th, 2021.
- Adam Kucharski, The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread — and Why They Stop, London: Profile Books, Ltd, 2020, p.90.
- James Bridle, Ways of Being — Beyond Human Intelligence. London; Allen Lane, 2022.
- Adam Kucharski, The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread — and Why They Stop, London: Profile Books, Ltd, 2020.
- James Bridle, Ways of Being — Beyond Human Intelligence. London; Allen Lane, 2022.
- Gal Beckerman, The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, New York: Crown, 2022.
- Rebecca Solnitt, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Third edition, Haymarket Books, 2016.
