Why we beganWe formed as a community interest company in early 2024 to do what’s often overlooked — deeply listen to the people, land and patterns of our place.What we found was both inspiring and urgent: a vibrant ecosystem of action and care, but fragmented and under-resourced.This Living Place exists to reconnect that web — building the relational, cultural and systemic infrastructure rural communities need to thrive.

Our team has grown from three to five in 2025! Five women, rooted across our rural bioregion.

From left to right: Laura Tyley (Someset), Huda Javed (Dorset), Deanne Tremlett (Somerset), Emma Butterworth (Devon), Jennifer Morisetti (Dorset).

What We DoWe’re transforming the cultural, relational and systemic conditions that shape life in rural places.

We work on the deep patterns - cultural, relational, and systemic - that determine how change happens within a place.

What’s emergingOur first year was a stepping stone—a year of deep listening, learning, and understanding what’s needed to rebuild thriving places. Before we could design ways forward, we had to map the gaps, build trust, and explore how collaboration could work here.

Our supporters and partners

Our first year focused on deep listening - to the land, to people, and to the patterns already present.

Over our first two years, we’ve been laying the foundations for a new kind of rural community organisation — one rooted in listening, connection and collaboration. Together with local partners, we’ve:• Brought Retrofit Reimagined to Dorset, in collaboration with Wessex Community Assets — reaching more than 17,000 people and sparking practical conversations about how communities can retrofit homes for a regenerative future.• Launched the Living Places Network, a peer-learning community of ten place-based practitioners from Northern Ireland to Devon, building solidarity and shared learning across rural contexts.• Seeded a Female Landworkers Collective, helping women across Somerset and Dorset connect, share resources, and strengthen their collective voice.• Partnered on Dorset COP for two consecutive years, helping the event evolve into a more participatory, community-shaped gathering.• Led live mapping processes at community events, helping people visualise the social and ecological transformation already unfolding in their towns and villages.• Collaborated with Transition Together, visiting almost every active Transition group in the South West to understand what enables and hinders local change — insights now shaping wider regional work.• Supported local organisations, from Sustainable Dorset to smaller rural initiatives, to revitalise their structures, strategies and impact.• Advised national funders, ensuring future funding programmes genuinely support grassroots, place-based efforts.• Partnered with the Youth Environmental Service to prototype a rural apprenticeship, creating a new entry route for young people and increasing representation in the environmental sector. This pilot connects three small rural organisations that could not otherwise hire full-time, addressing barriers of cost, access and succession, and modelling a new collaborative approach to building rural skills and representation.• Delivered talks and workshops, from the Environmental Funders Network and Be The Earth’s Festival to Dorset COP — amplifying rural grassroots voices and calling for a rewiring of how change happens, from isolated initiatives to place-based, community-led collaboration.• Amplified unheard rural stories, from endangered heritage crafts to community gatherings — uncovering skills, creativity and local leadership, and sharing them through a range of media channels to celebrate the people shaping regenerative futures in our region.Each of these projects strengthens the living infrastructure of our region — the relationships, skills and confidence that allow rural communities to lead transformation from the ground up.

We are here to help communities to rediscover their agency and collective strength in these turbulent times.

Our working hypothesis: When all these strands work together, they generate multi-level change — shifting power, redistributing resources, nurturing inclusion...

We’re now seeking support to launch a new series of projects shaped directly by what our region has told us it needs. They’ll deepen the work already underway, building cohesion across towns and villages, linking local action into a stronger ecosystem, and showing how rural communities can lead their own regenerative futures.These projects respond to the deep pressure points within our rural system — power, ownership, inclusion, livelihoods, story, and connection — and together, they build confidence, care, and collective agency.By 2030, we want to see a region more connected and courageous: communities with the relationships, culture, and shared capacity to meet whatever comes next.We’re weaving the living infrastructure for rural transformation — and inviting partners to help it grow.

📩 Want to collaborate or learn more? Get in touch: laura@thislivingplace.co.uk