Home - Seeding Our Future

Resilience and wisdom for the years ahead

The aim of Seeding our Future is to evolve and share ways that individuals, communities and front-line public services can grow their resilience skills and wisdom, to thrive and adapt to meet climate change and other pressures positively. We aim to do this by running pilot projects and commissioning research, then sharing our experience to encourage others to use it.

Seeding our Future (SoF) is a non-profit project, started in 2017. The founder and prime mover is Alan Heeks, a social entrepreneur and writer (see www.naturalhappiness.net). Alan has been exploring resilience for many years: he has led numerous workshops on this theme, and has a strong interest in sustainable communities. For more info, see About.

You can keep up with our latest insights and updates through our newsletter, or by following Seeding our Future on LinkedIn and Facebook. You may also be interested in our companion project Natural Happiness: follow on Facebook.

Current Projects

These are the three main projects which Alan is currently active on. Allies and helpers very welcome!

A. Food Security: Many of the best experts expect serious food shortages and price inflation in the next few years. For an excellent, detailed assessment of the UK outlook and responses needed at all levels from households to national Government, see Tim Lang’s report for the National Preparedness Commission, and related website.

Alan is working with the Our Food Trust and others to increase food security in Wales, where both national and local governments are responding actively to this issue. Our work addresses these issues across Wales, with a main focus on Powys. Overall the two main aims are:

Substantially increase local food production: especially fresh vegetables and fruit, when Wales is currently even more import-dependent than the UK overall. A first major step is the pilot demonstration project at Sarn Farm: three horticulture smallholdings created from a small farm on a long lease from Powys County Council.
Raise community resilience on food security: work on this issue is in an exploration phase with a range of local stakeholders: the aims include encouraging communities to develop Food Resilience Plans, to create the capacity to eat communally, and to teach the skills to cook fresh, seasonal, affordable meals. One of our potential partners is Cegin y Bobl in Carmarthenshire.

B. Community Places: Alan is working with a few others to explore early-stage visions for places which would help people find fellowship, direction, and soul resilience in a world of rising turbulence. Places which are dedicated to a vision and lovingly stewarded by a community can be a deep catalyst for groups and individuals.

The Deep Roots Community Imagine a core community of 6-8 people, living and growing food at a rural location in mid-Wales, with a shared, inclusive approach to integrate spirit with land and everyday life. The core community would be joined by small residential groups staying for a weekend to a week, and by a few apprentices staying for a few weeks to a few months. The underlying aim would be for the place, the community, and connection with the land to enable people to find their meaning, purpose, and soul resilience. Celtic Christianity has deep, old roots in mid-Wales, and this community would draw on these roots to nourish heart and soul amid the confusion of our times. See more here.
Eco-hamlets Garden hamlets would be a great way to help meet several urgent needs: for more local food production, for affordable housing, and to offer meaning, work and homes to young people who despair about the current situation. Imagine a community of 10-30 people, with 10-30 acres of land enabling them to grow much of their food, and also to grow fast-rotation biomass for heating. It could use Tiny Homes, which are a more ecological and comfortable equivalent of mobile homes, and this could make planning permission a lot easier. See more here.

For more information, see the Projects section of this website.

C. Community Climate Resilience: Strengthening local communities will be crucial in the years ahead, to help us all to live with increasing levels of disruption, e.g. to food supplies, utilities, weather patterns, and probably social cohesion. SoF can offer a range of insights and processes, drawn from our pilot projects and research, to help communities: see summary here. Our current focus is a major new project led by the Network for Social change, in which Alan is one of the core team.

Community Climate Resilience Project

This project aims to increase substantially the capacity of local communities across the UK to sustain themselves and adapt in the face of mounting disruption from climate change and other sources. Our plan is designed to achieve proof of concept for a number of initiatives early on, and to share them on a much wider scale in Years 2 and 3, helped by other funders. Strengthening social infrastructure can make a huge difference in times of crisis, as documented in Rebecca Solnit’s book A Paradise Built in Hell and Adam Greenfield’s more recent Lifehouse.

We recognise that the scale of the climate crisis, and other systemic issues such as social and economic injustice, cannot be rectified by any project, but it looks clear that strengthening the social infrastructure of local communities is one of the most effective interventions which is realistically achievable.

For a project summary click here.

Featured Blog

The Ministry for the Future: Kim Stanley Robinson

A gripping gateway to future possibilities This is a big book in every sense: 576 pages long, spanning decades in time and most parts of the world in place. MFF is often cited as a leading example of Thrutopian fiction: meaning that it offers us a picture of the future which is realistic but at least partly positive. The sheer scale of the book makes it hard to sum up, but also means that it becomes an immersive experience to read it, so you start to inhabit a convincing version of the future. The book is also classed as ‘hard science fiction’, i.e. based on plausible facts. There are many voices in this book, but the main thread is around Mary Murphy, head of the Ministry for the Future, a body set up under the Paris Agreement, which aims to champion the rights and needs of future generations. Seen from the viewpoint of these heavily discounted future beings, the active, manipulative selfishness of big business, the bureaucratic inertia of the international banks (“rulers of the world”, as Mary calls them), and the widespread denial, all feel truly painful, especially as the scale and intensity of climate disaster grows. A catalytic disaster is an extreme heatwave in India, which kills 20 million people within a month, but propels India into becoming a role model of sustainability: closing its coal mines, becoming carbon neutral, moving completely to organic, regenerative agriculture. This sounds a plausible scenario, as do many of its other ideas. During the 2030s, and 2040s, we see climate terrorism becoming widespread, using cheap drones to destroy fossil-fuel systems (e.g. air travel, dirty container ships) and assassinate individuals making big money from polluting activities. Cows across the world are infected with BSE, so meat consumption collapses. The book offers some attractive visions of how technology could step in when fossil-fuelled transport collapses, such as hydrofoil schooners with sails and electric motors coupled with photovoltaic sail fabric, and airships. Overall, what MFF depicts is a future of growing chaos and conflict, in which, slowly and painfully, many right things begin to happen. As confidence in money almost collapses, the international banks at last adopt Mary’s plan for a new carbon currency to reward cutting emissions and not extracting fossil fuels. This is quantitative easing on a huge, global scale, but slowly it works, and atmospheric CO2 finally starts to fall. If, like me, you’d like some glimmers of hope despite the many shades of gloom ahead, I recommend this book. Yes, it’s optimistic, but it is plausible too: progress could happen, and if it does, it will probably have to grow out of things getting worse before they improve, as they do in this book.