OUR UNFOLDING STORY

We began in the 1980s with a commitment to exploring leadership, responsibility, and regenerative practice. These were years when environmental concerns were growing, and many leaders felt ill-equipped to respond. We hosted reflective programmes like Stop the World – I Want to Get Off (1990–1995), offering space for individuals to pause, question, and reorient.

This theme led to a decade-long Collaborative Leadership Inquiry (2003–2010), engaging a cross-sector organisations resulting in Collabor8: Leadership for the 21st Century, a publication that captured new ways of leading, through collaboration, not control.

In the late 2000s, we partnered with Clare Short, the former Secretary of State for International Development, to run workshops across the UK. These workshops focused on supporting change at the edges, recognising that real community transformation often happens in the spaces between formal system structures, not within them.

At the same time, we explored the transpersonal - the parts of human experience often ignored at the time in many approaches. From 1990 to 2008, we facilitated the UK’s longest-running inquiry into transpersonal development, influencing our ongoing commitment to whole-person learning. This strand continues today through influences such as The Work That Reconnects, depth psychology, constellations and practices that honour ecological and cosmic interconnectedness.

Our work in grassroots resilience began with microfinance and community initiatives in Uganda, later evolving into broader work with grassroots organisations in the UK. Even after closing our Uganda programmes in 2019, the resilience theme remains central - particularly in how we support local leaders and community activators facing systemic uncertainty and social inequality.

In partnership with two women leaders from South America, we launched Learning from Women, an initiative that sought to bring the learning and lived experiences of women in the Global South into the dominant systems of the North. This work honoured voices and perspectives too often marginalised, helping to challenge assumptions and shift leadership models towards greater inclusion, reciprocity, and global awareness.

From the mid 2010’s through PEERworks, we focused on peer-based leadership and prefigurative action in grassroots organisations. This six-year initiative combined public programmes, annual gatherings, and produced a final publication capturing real-world lessons from organisations practicing radical collaboration.

From 2021 onwards, this strand evolved into the Prefigurative Social Action Inquiry, in partnership with Social Action Inquiry Scotland, supporting leaders who practice the future they want to see, building the new in the shell of the old.

In the early 2020s, we partnered with housing associations, local government, and grassroots organisations in a three-year initiative to develop regenerative community practice in some of the UK’s most deprived wards. This project focused on shifting from short-term service delivery to long-term community flourishing, embedding systems thinking, trust-building, and place-based leadership.

We convened two major multi-sector inquiries into the future of work and leadership. These resulted in publications that travelled globally - presented in New York at a UN gathering, at RSA London, and in the Scottish Parliament. The question at the heart of this work was simple but radical: What does work look like if people and planet really matter?

These inquiry processes sought to disrupt ‘business-as-usual’, bringing in Oasis’s experience in whole person learning and developing 21st century relationships, asking questions beyond the workaday; building on the premise that what we know, how we use it, what we believe in, how we want to organise ourselves and, above all, the nature and quality of our relationships, will underpin the autonomy and connectivity framing the workplace of tomorrow.

Working from an awareness of the 21st century as a critical juncture for the sustainability of our planet and its peoples, the process sought to disrupt ‘business-as-usual’ and sit with uncertainty and the unknown. Through multisectoral interviews, consultations, and discussion groups, 13 paradoxes were identified that reflect the tensions inherent in building the workplace of tomorrow, and 7 principles to sit with and reflect on those paradoxes.

This process reflected our earlier work, indicating that real change will come when people and organisations live more sustainably from the inside out: maintaining a nurturing connection with the planet; creating space for reflective and value-based practice; holding awareness of possibilities and technologies for the future whilst remaining in touch with present realities; and making conscious decisions in life and work based on core values.

The COVID-19 pandemic demanded new frameworks for living with uncertainty. In response, we partnered with multiple organisations to develop a suite of resources under the theme Working with the Unimaginable, including the influential Five Responses to Uncertainty - supporting leaders and organisations to work with crisis and complexity without collapsing into overwhelm. This chapter of our story emerged from our experience of working with change and uncertainty, with an eye to both the systemic global picture and the interpersonal and relational. 

Alongside 32 community blogs throughout the pandemic on these themes, we also launched a collaborative research and inquiry process -Navigating the Unimaginable - led by Chris Taylor, the Director of the Oasis Foundation. This widened our inquiry to face into the emerging metacrisis and resulted in seven papers detailing the existential nature of the crisis and highlighting emerging responses to it. This began our explorations of regenerative practice and strategies to build ecological, interrelational and societal resilience.

Our current phase of work deepens the commitment to embodied, whole-person leadership for social change, including:

The Embodying Change programme (2025), supporting community development practitioners to work with wicked issues through personal, relational, and systemic learning.

A growing focus on partnering with others to develop networked localism (2024–2028), supporting place-based transformation linked to larger systemic shifts.

A series of rites of passage programmes in partnership with Oikos (2021–present), helping young social change leaders in Europe transition into purposeful adulthood with humility and courage.

Throughout our journey, we have consistently offered OD, coach and leader development bursaries to grassroots and social change organisations - providing space, resources, and reflective support for organisations navigating growth, conflict, or change. These bursaries have supported and continue to support organisations like Migrant Action (Leeds), Connect Futures (Birmingham), The Junction (Leith), Brunswick Learning Differences, and others working at the frontline of social impact.

Across three decades, the golden thread running through our work is a commitment to learning as social change - not learning as content, but learning as process, reflection, and practice.

We have learned to:

• Hold space for difficult questions, not just rush to solutions.

• Work with emergence and uncertainty, not just manage it away.

• Support leaders and organisations to embody the change they wish to see, in themselves and in the systems they serve.