About

In 2020 I was developing the Oxygen Fund, a £5m revolving equity fund with the Oxfordshire Growth Deal, but with repeated slow progress despite political support I had a growing dissatisfaction with gatekeeper entities and poor value-distribution mechanics in society.

I started looking for a different route which led me explore how regenerative land use can be supported through Distributed Co-operative Organisations (DisCOs🕺) and web3 Regenerative Finance (ReFi) projects. I embarked on training and project participation to build my knowledge in the socially positive side of web3…

Fast forward to today and I am in the core team of regenerative blockchain-based property developer Oasa, a Swiss Association, which bought its first piece of land in 2021 at Traditional Dream Factory in Portugal. In building this ecosystem together, I am the interface between various thematic working ‘circles’ and have led the design of our sociocratic coordination system. In the pursuit of learning more about token design and governance processes I have also contributed to the development of other DAOs and have been accepted onto two refi accelerators in 2022.

In 2023 I started working for Dark Matter Labs which shifted my world view significantly.

Where I’ve come from

I’m a researcher, Sociocracy practitioner, and One Planet Living Integrator with 10 years of working experience implementing projects on citizen-led forms of development. I was going to be an architect, (and do still co-run an architecture practice) but I took a slightly different route with my qualifications…

My base has been within the Oxford-based architecture and research co-operative Transition by Design. As we built this organisation, I felt that understanding finance and land were the important layers to comprehending the housing problem, and so I began to form a bespoke role as a critical friend to citizen-led groups.

I was a few years into having played this supportive role to groups across England, when the Community Housing Fund came out and I was named as the Oxfordshire contact for Local Authorities. I knew that to create a self-sustaining movement, we needed a well-resourced facility to train, finance, research and lobby for more collaborative approaches to housing and this needed to be at a bigger scale than a single city or county. It needed to overlap political boundaries and so I set my eyes on the wider Thames Valley. I took this opportunity to assemble organisations into a three-county enabling advisory hub in 2017 called Collaborative Housing. The CoHoHub aims in the Thames Valley.

As a researcher I have collaborated on research team projects for foundations, public bodies and private institutions (find my list of projects here). I have formal training in building financial development appraisals and in quantitative and qualitative research methods, which I find helps me to better co-ordinate with experts.

When things need to be less official, I spin up my own hobby research project websites such as Unviable which uses diagrammatic analysis of real sites in Oxford to increase public understanding of how developers use financial appraisals to exploit loopholes in the planning system; or Who Owns Oxford? which aims to visualise how land ownership patterns across Oxfordshire affect the ability to deliver vital infrastructure within the city.

Presentations and speaking

Nov 22 - RIBA Guerrilla Tactics CPD - ‘Opportunities in community-led housing’

Nov 22 - Accidental Gods [Podcast] 🔗

Oct 22 - The Ownership Economy [Podcast] 🔗

Sep 22 - Regens Unite Berlin - Presentation on OASA and Traditional Dream Factory

May 22 - Regens Unite Brussels - Presentation on Community Land Trusts and web3

Mar 22 - Oxford-Cambridge Arc Stewardship Event - Keynote (Slides)

Jan 22 - UK Local Authorities CLH Working Group - Presentation on land stewardship and Garden Communities

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