The world’s governments will be coming together for 2 weeks to, hopefully, reach some kind of binding agreement that might give the world at least a fighting chance of preventing runaway climate change. There’s one problem though...   On a planet where over half the population is female, the leadership team put together by the UK government, who are hosting these talks, is almost exclusively male. Yes, you heard that right. And yet, climate change is an issue that impacts women more than men. It disproportionately impacts their livelihoods, the levels of violence they face, their educational opportunities and much more.   Yet we know that involving the diversity of a population in making big decisions that affect them can lead to far greater public support, not to mention better ideas. Research also shows that women understand climate change better than men, are more open to change and to big ideas, and bring a more compassionate approach to decisionmaking.   I'm joined to explore this by the fabulous Nameerah Hameed and by Bianca Pitt, both of, among other things, #SheChangesClimate. I hope you love our conversation as much as we did. Please let us know what you think. And  do share the link with your friends and do sign She Changes Climate's Open Letter. And see you in two weeks, for a fascinating episode to mark our 40th episode.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

Everywhere, where you live included, has a patchwork of organisations of different sizes who are doing business and making things happen in a way that is not solely about the generation of profit, but about serving a larger social purpose. They might be called social enterprises, or socially-trading organisations, or all sorts of other things.   Today’s episode asks what if they got together and designed how better they might join up and work in a more connected way? What if they offered peer to peer support between each other? What if the Mayor of the city got behind this new network, and saw it as an opportunity to invest and support the emergence of a new economy? What if that investment was then, as each enterprise found its feet and generated surpluses, reinvested back on a pay-it-forward basis to help other emerging enterprises? And what if this skilful support for a new economy spread and spread and became the default model for how to regenerate the economies of towns and cities across the land?   Sounds good doesn’t it? Well stand by. You’re about to hear a story of how this is actually happening, one you won’t have read about in the papers or seen on TV, but it’s very much a reality. I am joined by two amazing guests who have played an active role in making this happen.   Danielle Cohen joined Power to Change, the independent trust that supports community businesses in England, in 2018. She works in cities and regions to enable the community business sector to flourish as part of the local economy. Her work has included partnering on the development of Kindred, a social investment vehicle owned and led by the social economy in Liverpool City Region, backed by the city region’s Combined Authority and Power to Change. Before joining Power to Change, Danielle worked in urban regeneration, community engagement and corporate responsibility, including as deputy CEO of a central London BID. She believes passionately in building a regenerative economy which nurtures people and planet.   Erika Rushton has 35 years of experience in supporting and investing in communities and creative enterprises to create, grow, occupy and reinvent their own economies. She has worked with homes, workplaces, towns, whole cities, industry sectors and communities of interest at a regional, national and international level.   She is the Director of Creative Economist whose current contracts include Islington Mill Arts Club to deliver The Other City – an Artist led £7 million redevelopment of heritage and modern buildings accommodating 150+ creative enterprises; Women In Space a network of 25+ creative women from across the UK who have taken over unwanted land and buildings, creating value and giving places new purpose; and Kindred, which you’ll hear more about shortly.  She mentors creative women leaders nationally and internationally; lectures internationally; and works voluntarily to address intersectional gender discrimination in the UK.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

The decline of insect populations around the world has been nothing short of terrifying. Last year I visited a school in an intensive wine-producing region in France, and suggested to the kids that they might build an insect hotel, only to be told by the head teacher "we don't have any insects here". It has stayed with me ever since. So in today's episode, we are exploring how it would feel to live through a time when insect population, and biodiversity in general, bounced back? If we did everything we possibly could to create the conditions for that? How incredible would that be?   My guests are Vicki Hird, who runs Sustain: The Alliance for Better Food, and is the author of the just-published 'Rebugging the Planet: The Remarkable Things that Insects (and Other Invertebrates) Do – And Why We Need to Love Them More', and Matt Shardlow is CEO of Buglife, "the only organisation in Europe devoted to the conservation of all invertebrates". Do join them and support their work.   Thanks as ever to Ben Addicott for sound production and theme music, and for our taste this week of what my Time Machine sounds like...  Do let me know what you thought of this episode.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

Today we bring together Anthea Lawson, author of the fabulous new book 'The Entangled Activist' and Alastair McIntosh, author of 'Soul and Soil' and 'Riders on the Storm'. I usually try to constrain the conversations we have here to around 45 minutes, but this one was so fascinating that we just kept rolling, and just kept chatting, and so this one actually comes in at an hour and a quarter! But you'll love it I promise, and you'll wish we'd kept going. I'm not going to tell you anything else, just that you will love it, and I so look forward to your reflections and comments.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

Today’s episode of From What If to What Next is about care. Care has been very much on our minds of recent. COVID has highlighted how vitally important care is and yet how undervalued it is. It is so often seen as being the domain of women, and around the world it is often either underpaid, or unpaid work. As the populations of the Global North live longer and longer, and as young people are unable to afford, often, to leave home, it tends to often fall to women to care for both the younger and the older generations simultaneously, what is sometimes called the ‘Sandwich Generation’.   Many people are happy to stand on their doorsteps and clap for those who provide the care in our society, but not to really value care, not to campaign for it to be truly valued. These days of COVID have the potential to be a real watershed moment. So in today's episode, with two extraordinary women, we're asking "what if care work was valued?” This is an episode that might very well lead to inner paradigm shifts...   Kavita Ramdas is a recognized global advocate for intersectional gender equity and justice. She currently serves as the Director of the Women’s Rights Program at the Open Society Foundations. She also serves on a few select non-profit advisory boards, the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the board of directors of GRIST, a publicly supported journalism non-profit focused on climate justice.   Ai-jen Poo is an award-winning organizer, author, and a leading voice in the women’s movement. She is the Executive Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Director of Caring Across Generations, Co-Founder of SuperMajority, Co-Host of Sunstorm podcast and a Trustee of the Ford Foundation. Ai-jen is a nationally recognized expert on elder and family care, the future of work, and what’s at stake for women of color. She is the author of the celebrated book, The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

You are in for such a treat. This is one of the most thought-provoking and inspiring episodes of this podcast yet. It was my huge honour to be joined by Yumna Hussen and Lottie Cooke to discuss what a reimagined education system would be like. Honestly, spending an hour in the company of these two remarkable young people, so articulate and well informed, was just a joy.   Lottie and Yumna are part of an organisation called Pupil Power which is "committed to educating, engaging and transforming young minds around the issues impacting our experience of school". "So", they add, "we're demanding an entire transformation in education". And this conversation will inspire you that such a transformation is not only possible, and thrilling, but also long overdue. If one of these two young people isn't Prime Minister within 20 years I will be most disappointed.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

Here is the perfect accompaniment to the long summer days. Or the deluge. Or perhaps a bit of both. Today we are talking about travel. As many cities begin to actively take steps away from the dominance of cars, we are asking what might it be like if that had already happened? What might it be like to live in a city in which more travel now takes place on food or on two wheels? And how are electric vehicles transforming that? It's a brilliant discussion with two amazing guests. As always, do let me know what you think, feedback is much appreciated. Carson Brown is a Co-founder and Head of Product at TAUR an electric scooter brand. Having spent the majority of his career dedicated to developing micromobility products. He is a strong advocate for greener, more efficient cities, and enabling people to change their lifestyle through considered design. Melissa Bruntlett is a urban mobility advocate specializing in communications and engagement. She is also the co-author of Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality and the newly released Curbing Traffic: The human case for fewer cars in our lives. Melissa focuses on urban mobility and sustainable cities, and believes it is imperative to build cities that work for every citizen, using her experience as a writer, marketer, and media producer to share the human perspective of multi-modal transport to a mainstream audience. Professionally, Melissa supports knowledge sharing and capacity building to create more equitable mobility environments, working with and advising public and private partners in Europe, North America and Australasia to develop effective and compelling communications and engagement plans and strategies. She is a Canadian living in the Netherlands with her husband Chris and their two children Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

Firstly, sorry I'm late posting this. I was on a clifftop in Cornwall and the sun was shining and so it took me a while to get home! But, I must say that this episode is absolutely worth the wait. One of my favourites so far. This week we are exploring the black imagination, with two amazing guests.   Natasha Marin is an antiracism consultant based in Seattle, specialising in communications, community building, and digital engagement. She is the curator of Black Imagination: Black Voices on Black Futures and a conceptual artist whose people-centred projects have circled the globe since 2012 and have been recognised and widely acknowledged. BLACK IMAGINATION—a series of conceptual exhibitions—amplifying, centring, and holding sacred a diverse sample of voices including LGBTQIA+ black youth, incarcerated black women, black folks with disabilities, unsheltered black folks, and black children was her bravest work thus far. Her viral web-based project, Reparations, engaged a quarter of a million people worldwide in the practice of “leveraging privilege,” and earned Marin, a mother of two, death threats by the dozens.   Natalie Creary is the Programme Delivery Director for Black Thrive Lambeth. The cross-sector partnership works to dismantle the structural barriers that create and sustain mental health inequalities for Black African and African-Caribbean communities in Lambeth. She has a long-standing interest in approaches that tackle the root causes of inequality and push conventional boundaries. Her interest lies in working with communities and grassroots organisations to decolonise knowledge and to create opportunities for communities to have ownership of their stories and the solutions they deliver to address the social challenges they may face. Her work and research explore how race, age, class, gender and sexuality intersect to shape the health and wellbeing experiences of Black and mixed race communities. She has also completed postgraduate studies in Health Psychology and lectures on health inequality, quality improvement methodologies and health promotion for Middlesex University’s MSc Public Health. She is also on the editorial board of the Lancet Psychiatry.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

This is such an incredible episode. One of those ones I had to go off and sit under a tree afterwards to absorb. Today we talk about gender. I grew up in a society that thought in terms of two genders, you were male or you were female. This was accompanied by expectations that men behaved in ways that were ‘masculine’, and women in ways seen as being ‘feminine’. If you were someone who didn’t identify as either, or someone who challenged society’s expectations of what being masculine or feminine meant, it was a bleak time. And in many cultures, far bleaker still, indeed very dangerous.   Some cultures recognise a ‘third’ gender, but what would it be like if we were to see gender instead as a spectrum, and where you choose to place yourself on that spectrum is up to you, and can change as often as you like? What if society accommodated, supported, nurtured even, such a degree of fluidity? What if everyone could be who they wanted to be, to define themselves however they wanted to, and the kind of abuse so many LGBTQI+ people experience was instead replaced by a culture that valued people wherever they are across the spectrum. What wonders might such an approach unlock in our culture?   Syd Yang is the Senior Advisor for Healing Justice and Wellness at Movement Voter Project. Syd's work finds its resonance in the stories we each hold at the intersection of memory, body, sexuality and mental health. Syd works primarily with queer and trans BIPOC individuals as well as regularly leads workshops, community healing circles and has been a group facilitator for over two decades, with a specific focus on grief, healing ancestral trauma, sexuality + spirituality, body liberation and eating disorder recovery.   Mahfam Malek has held many roles in justice movements over the years, including facilitator, somatic coach, non-profit staff of many stripes, social justice-oriented stand-up comic, direct-action and cultural organiser, environmental educator, and more. In addition to training, facilitating, and coaching, they write, organise with a group of abolitionist diasporic Iranians, hang out with their dog, and chat on the phone nearly daily about absolutely nothing with their parents. They are also the Training and Operations Director at the Chicago Torture Justice Center.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

Episode Thirty. Wow. Whoever thought we'd get this far? Thank you so much for your support in making that possible. We have a delicious episode to mark this moment.   Farzana Khan is a writer, director, cultural producer and award-winning Arts educator. She is the co-founder and Director of Healing Justice London. She has a background in Youth and Community work particularly focused on arts based education projects both in the UK and internationally. She was also the former creative and strategic director at Voices that Shake and is currently a Fellow at the International Curatorial Forum. Farzana was recently awarded Writer in Residence at Toynbee Hall, working on ‘All Water Has a Perfect Memory’ a screenplay exploring trauma, poverty, womanhood and bodily dignity amidst gentrified East London and ecologically violent times.   Looby Macnamara has been teaching permaculture for nearly 20 years. During this time she has been a pioneer of personal and social permaculture, authoring the first book globally to focus on the peoplecare ethic People & Permaculture. Looby is also author of 7 Ways to Think Differently and Strands of Infinity. Her latest book, Cultural Emergence shares a pioneering toolkit for regeneration and transformation. She runs Applewood Permaculture Centre in the UK with her partner Chris Evans. She is also one of the partners of the European Mother Nature project, empowering mothers. Looby has been an active member of the permaculture community, and was a chairperson of the Permaculture Association and is a senior diploma tutor.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.