Next Event
​Growing the Movement
Braziers Park, Oxfordshire, 9-12 July 2026
For our 5th annual Communities Conference we will return to Braziers Park. This year we will be focussing on what we can do to shape our network, looking for ways that support us and develop the means and meaning that enables us to live collectively. We will hold group conversations aimed at building collaboration between existing communities, as well as supporting people wanting to establish new projects. We want the event to create a tangible sense of shared purpose, and for us to come away from the weekend with connections and ideas that we can act on, which will continue to grow over the following years.
Tickets are now sold out, and this page will be updated with details about the programme throughout the spring. We don't want cost to be a barrier for people to attend: a limited number of concession tickets are available, and if this is still prohibitive then please do get in touch and we will hopefully be able to offer further reductions. These tickets are funded by full-price and generosity-tier tickets, so if you are able to afford these then please do.
Event & Venue Information
Braziers Park is one of the UKs oldest secular communities, set up in 1950 with an aim to practice and learn about alternative social structures in the wake of WW2. It now houses about 35 residents and hosts events year-round in their pseudo-gothic main house and large grounds. It is located mid-way between Oxford and Reading.
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​The 2026 conference is a fully catered camping weekend.​ Limited indoor accommodation is available at the venue at an additional cost, and can also be found in nearby Wallingford and Oxford. ​
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​Camping
We will open the campsite at 1500 on Thursday, and will ask participants to leave by 1800 on Sunday. We welcome tents and camper vans, but we’re not licensed for caravans. Our camping field has composting loos and water points. Warm showers will be available throughout the conference. If you plan to camp, please bring everything you need – we cannot provide spare equipment. The camping field is not lit at night, so bring a torch and batteries. We also recommend a foldable camping chair.
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Food and Drink
Meals from Thursday evening to Sunday lunchtime are included in the ticket price.
We cater to as many dietary requirements as we can (including vegan and gluten-free), but we may not be able to meet every need. Tea will be available during breaks. We suggest bringing a few extra snacks and a refillable water bottle.
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If you can, please bring reusable cups, cutlery and plates for meals. This is a huge help to us, simplifying clear-up and reducing waste!
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Kids
Children of all ages are welcome at the conference. We plan on offering specific sessions for children. Note that we don't offer childcare and children are the responsibility of their adults for the duration of the event. Under 5s can attend for free.
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Travel
Parking will be available on site throughout the event. For safety, no cars are allowed in the camping area after Thursday evening.
The venue is accessible with public transport: the X40 bus runs regularly within a 5 minute walk of Braziers, and runs between Reading station and Oxford. We will also try to support lift-sharing nearer to the event.
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Dogs
Braziers Park is a working farm, and we often have livestock in our fields. In general, we don’t allow dogs on site. If you wish to bring an assistance dog, please email us.
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Rooms
A small number of rooms are available in Braziers House at our B+B rates; see our ticketing portal and email us for more details. Indoor accommodation is limited: once the house is full then you can look for local B&Bs or hotels in nearby Wallingford, Oxford, or Reading.
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Access
We hope to make the conference (and all events at Braziers Park) as accessible as possible, regardless of identity and physical ability. However, with a listed building over 300 years old and and a large, rolling rural estate, it can be challenging for us to make our site accessible to people with physical disabilities. People with mobility problems do regularly visit Braziers and we are very willing to seek creative solutions to access issues. Please contact us with any questions.
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Please note that this is mainly a camping event. If you will need a room in the house for access reasons, please get in touch well in advance, as availability is limited.
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For other information, including about accessibility, see our FAQs.
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Programme
The event starts on Friday morning at 10am. You are welcome to arrive on Thursday afternoon/evening. We will provide a light dinner for early arrivals, and some low-key entertainment on Thursday evening. ​We'll have scheduled sessions from Friday morning through to lunchtime on Sunday, and will end with a closing circle by mid-afternoon. In the evenings we'll have music and entertainment.
The event is structured around the theme of Growing the Movement, and during the weekend we will be having conversations for people already living in communities, and people wanting to establish new ones. These conversations will aim to help us better understand where we are as a movement, what common challenges we face, and how we might want to organise in the future to help grow what we do.
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The sessions that we have planned include:
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Group Sessions
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Facilitated group sessions will include daily morning circles and home groups. We will also be holding discussion spaces for people in community, wanting to join, or establishing their own, to talk about common issues, hopes and solutions.
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The sessions for new & establishing communities will be led by Yana Ludwig. Yana's work spans 35 years in the nonprofit sector and 20 as a consultant, facilitator and trainer for cooperative groups. She is the author of multiple books, including Building Belonging: Your Guide to Starting a Residential Intentional Community and the co-authored Cooperative Culture Handbook. Yana grounds her work in 27 years of communal living experience in the US. Her core values are solidarity, compassion, directness, lifelong learning, cooperation and systems thinking. Yana is currently a Masters Creative Writing student at Swansea University in Wales, and writes leftist resistance-, queer- and eco-poetry, and dabbles in fiction, memoir and playwriting.
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For those looking to join communities, members of the conference team and diggers and dreamers will hold an introductory session outlining some common forms of community and their joining processes on Friday. The Sunday session will then be a chance to reflect on what next steps will most support you in finding a community to call home.
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The sessions for existing communards will be facilitated by the conference organisers, with an emphasis on drawing out our ideas and hopes, and building collective capacity to continue developing mutual support and growing the movement.
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Talks & Panels
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Network-Holders Panel
Representatives from Diggers and Dreamers, the UK Co-Housing Network, Radical Routes, and the Foundation for Intentional Community will introduce the work that they are doing to support the intentional communities movement, with open-ended discussion about where we see the movement going and what we hope for from each other.
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Diggers and Dreamers - State of the Union & Launch of 2026 Directory
Diggers and Dreamers
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Diggers and Dreamers will be informing and entertaining us with an update on the state of the communities movement and insights that come from their publication of this years' communities directory.
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History of Community Organising
Emma Cardwell, Forgebank Co-Housing & Lancaster University
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The common property set-up of intentional communities may seem unconventional in today's Britain, but it actually has a long history. This talk looks at the long history of community organising in England, and asks what it tells us about our efforts to set up communities today.
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Social Experimentation & Decision Making at Braziers Park
Braziers Park Residents
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Braziers Park was founded as a School for Integrative Social Research in the 1950s, learning through its' internal decision making and social processes. As well as hosting events such as the Communities Conference, the current residents carry on that journey through the way they enact community. Residents will reflect on their experience and the learnings that come from living within a self-avowed social experiment.
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Experiences of Christian Community
Lakshmi Piette Walker ​
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Lakshmi is a writer, researcher, podcaster and practitioner, passionate about sharing the witness of intentional Christian communities (ICCs) as places of profound spiritual and social transformation. She is the founder and host of the Dwelling Place podcast and blog which profiles diverse ICCs and shares stories from their community members, leaders and founders. She is author of Dwelling Places: The Practice and Witness of Intentional Christian Communities (SCM Press) and holds a Master of Divinity specialising in ICC from the Earlham School of Religion (USA). She works with US and UK community networks to support the ICC movement. She currently lives in rural Cumbria, where she is part of the emerging Rose Community, and can daily be found galivanting through fields and woodland, relishing the groundedness of natural being and the dances of the wind.
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Economies of Community
Emma Cardwell & Jenny Pickerill
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This discussion session looks at the frustrations communities, both established and forming, face when it comes to finances. We hope to cover issues like mortgages, insurance and land sales, with the aim to both learn from one another, and via a research project run by Jenny Pickerill (Sheffield University) and Emma Cardwell (Lancaster University) provide advice for policy to make intentional community living more financially accessible.
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Building your own Home and Unlocking Planning Permission on Land
May Fisher, LivedIn
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The dream of building your own home doesn't have to be a pipedream. It's entirely possible, fun, a great learning opportunity and you'll end up with a home imbued with stories and care. But where to start?
The planning system is deliberately dense and hard to navigate. May will be talking about how to unlock planning on land, set up options with landowners and the different routes available. Understanding the basics of what is possible within policy frameworks and where you can push limits will empower you to engage in the process of site searching. Whether you want to build your own community at the edge of a village, go completely rural and off grid or take on a run-down building, it's not impossible; just complicated.
Working as Community Lead at LivedIn, May works primarily with people that want to build their own homes but has a broad knowledge of the planning system and can help direct to professional support. After an outline of the work that May does, we will have a circle discussion about where people are at on the journey and go through your questions. May will be available for specific site assessments and discussions after the workshop.
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International Forum Online Panel
Chaired by Claudia Marcos Sánchez Manrique & Ian Hare, UK Communities Conference Founders
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We will host an online panel with representatives from various international communities, to share the commonalities and differences with communities in different cultures. ​Claudia and Ian are currently establishing a community in Peru, and have spent the previous couple of years visiting communities across South and North America, Europe, and Australia.
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Bringing out the Unity in Community
Hannah Dalgleish & Hamid van Koten, Chisholme Institute & Bowden House Community
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Communities take many forms, shaped by different intentions, values, and the diverse reasons people come together. This workshop invites participants to explore some fundamental questions: What gives a community its sense of cohesion? Is a shared purpose essential—and if so, how is it defined? What does unity look like in an intentional community, and how is it sustained? Together, we’ll reflect on the role of shared values, service, and spirituality in shaping collective life. We’ll also consider the concept of communitas—those moments of deep connection and equality that can arise within groups, creating a strong sense of belonging that transcends everyday roles and hierarchies.
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Hannah is an interdisciplinary researcher at the University of Southampton and has been a regular facilitator at the Chisholme Institute, a spiritual school and retreat centre in the Scottish Borders. Hamid brings decades of lived experience in a wide range of communal settings. He is currently a director of the Bowden House Community near Totnes, Devon, and chair of the Chisholme Institute.
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Technology: Friend or Foe?
Shuo Feng, Goldsmiths
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Born and raised in China, Shuo is a previous ACRE resident at Braziers and a current researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. She recently visited a rural queer-feminist commune in China and became fascinated by how digital technologies and social media are embraced there. People of the commune engage in digital platform economies to safeguard their queer-feminist identities from the hegemonic capitalism and patriarchy, and eventually build underground networks with other like-minded individuals and groups. In this open workshop, Shuo invites participants to share their views on the relationship between intentional communities and digital technologies. Together, to understand why such technologies are often regarded as foes by intentional communities and explore whether they can be transformed/reinterpreted to support community building and connection.
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Comparing US and European Communities
Paxus Calta, Twin Oaks Communities Conference
Paxus Calta has been the principal organizer for the Twin Oaks Communities Conference for many years. They are traveling with their partner, Pepper, working to start new intentional communities of US immigrants in Europe. Their talk will include experiences of intentional communities on both sides of the Atlantic, and their aspiration to establish a new project in partnership with established European communities.
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Lessons Learnt from Setting up a Community
Chris Austin, Old Rectory
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Chris will share his personal experience of being part of a group who bought a house and now live together as one household and are a new intentional community. There's a lot to learn about, discuss and agree on! Chris will use the following themes.
1.) Different Communities - what am I drawn to?
2.) Knowing yourself – a commitment to personal change.
3.) Uncertainty, complexity, conflict and change - how do you cope?
4.) Vision, structure, location, finances and membership
5.) Useful resources
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Longer Workshops
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Reconnecting Humanity
Karl Lam & Alima Adams
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This workshop looks at why, despite our best intentions, our communities and organisations often end up recreating many of the social problems we are trying to overcome. This 3-hour interactive session includes space for personal sharing, and offers practical tools to help mend broken relationships and build resilience and trust.
Karl and Alima live in an intentional community. They have been looking at why progressive organisations and social movements often struggle with internal divisions, and how to address those difficulties. They are regulars at the UK Communities Conference and have run this workshop over 200 times, with 2,500 people attending from 47 countries.
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Growing Without Fracturing: Navigating Emotional Intensity in Collective Living
Kirstin Heidler, NVC Matters UK
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Intentional communities are often founded on shared values of care, inclusion and deep relational engagement. Yet these same qualities can make groups vulnerable to destabilisation. Many communities have experienced moments where one person’s emotional intensity — whether rooted in pain, urgency, or unmet needs — begins to dominate the field. Meetings derail. Factions form. Energy drains. The group either polarises or quietly fragments. This session explores a common but rarely named dynamic: the difference between emotional fusion and differentiation, and how this impacts collective life.
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Drawing from relational theory, Nonviolent Communication, restorative practice, and systemic thinking, this workshop offers both conceptual clarity and embodied practice. Through structured role-plays, small-group exercises, and facilitated debriefs, participants will experiment with practical interventions that help a group stay centred when intensity rises. We will practice responses that neither collapse into caretaking nor escalate into confrontation. Participants will leave with shared language, practical tools, and a deeper understanding of how to stabilise relational fields — so that communities can expand without splitting.
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High Dreams and Low Dreams: the forces moving your community
Sam Settle, Braziers Park & Laura Grassi, Grassroots Facilitation
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At the heart of each intentional community sit high dreams and low dreams. High dreams are our deepest beliefs and highest hopes, our expectations that we will live up to some ideal. They describe the world we want to create and can keep us engaged in life. Often, high dreams are not consciously thought about, named or worked with.
Our low dreams are also ever present and usually unexamined. Low dreams happen when we are overwhelmed, disappointed or in shock about what might go – or has gone – wrong. You can lose hope, walk out, swear you’ll never go near human beings again, or resign yourself to things never changing.
Consciously stepping into your high and low dreams of community can lead to meaningful shifts. That’s the point of this workshop. After some explanation and several exercises, we’ll offer participants from one community a chance to work with the facilitators more intensively with their high and low dreams.
Laura Grassi of Grassroots Facilitation and her Processwork Colleague and Braziers Park resident Sam Settle will lead this workshop and look forward to seeing you!
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Play, Create & Celebrate
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We have a few different creative & playful sessions planned, and will add details here as we decide them. There will be a Ceilidh on Friday evening with local band Ramshackle, and a cabaret and jam on Saturday evening led by the musicians at Braziers Park.
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Wiggle (Morning Movement Session)
May Fisher
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Wake up movement with May. Combining yoga asana, breathwork, somatic movement, qigong, shoden balance and sound healing. Welcoming all levels of experience, especially those who might feel like yoga is not for them. May is a queer neurospicy facilitator who will explain, demonstrate and give multiple options - and you're always welcome to rest. Let's spend an hour remembering we're animals, have a wiggle, shake it off and give the body permission to land, closing with a luxurious sound bath. Bring a mat/towel/blanket to put on the ground and a blanket for the sound bath savasana.
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Singing
Rona Topaz
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Rona Topaz is a singer, actor and choir leader based in Berkshire and London. She has been leading community choirs since 2015 with a specialism to bringing the performing arts to people with limited access, such people with dementia and other health conditions. Today’s choir for singers and non singers alike will focus on learning songs old and new that have a strong political context. The emphasis will be on learning harmony and performance dynamics, resulting in an informal sharing of the work for those who would like to do so.
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All-Weather Improvising
Alice Gale-Feeney, Braziers Park
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We will explore the creative possibilities of improvised movement and writing in outdoor spaces at Braziers.
No experience needed and all welcome.
I’m interested in the relationship between freedom and constraint, experiences we each may know within our bodies differently whilst we move. By working outdoors, we add in unexpected changing conditions : weather and stimulating sensory information that we can work with. Moving and writing are used as tools to digest this information.
We will consider how our attention shifts, changes, finds focus and diverges. I will support small acts of risk-taking through imaginative ways of being in the space, opening up the potential for surprising ways to relate to the space and each other.
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Alice is a Braziers Park resident and artist who performs solo and in groups across art dance, cabaret and archive spaces. Alice has been improvising for over 12 years. She developed a method for improvising and scriptwriting writing during her MFA in creative practice: dance professional practice at Laban / Independent Dance which informs the session. She is inspired by improvisors and movement practitioners who she has worked with or encountered in book-form including Danielle Goldman, Yumino Seki, Heni Hale, Miranda Tufnell, Anne Cooper-Albright amongst many others.
Ask Alice about her future outdoor improvisation workshop taking place at Braziers Park.
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Moving Connections
Hamid van Koten, Bowden House
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hamid will lead a movement-based session inspired by Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects and the 5 Rhythms movement practice. It is designed to foster deep interpersonal connection in a setting that is welcoming, engaging, and accessible. The experience aims to be light and playful while also offering space for reflection and depth for those who are open to it. Through movement and music, participants are invited into authentic connection—with themselves, with others, and with the group as a whole. This is an active, participatory workshop, though no prior experience is required and there are no steps to learn.
Hamid is an experienced and certified 5Rhythms teacher (trained by Gabriele Roth) and a founding member of the Totnes Dance Collective, a community of conscious dance practitioners based in Devon. He lives in an intentional community near Totnes and serves as chair of the Chisholme Institute, a retreat centre in the Scottish Borders.
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Evening Entertainment
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The evenings are for celebrating! Friday evening will be led by Ramshakle, a local band who will call a ceilidh for us. Saturday evening will include a Cabaret and an open Jam with the Braziers house band, so bring your instruments.
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We also expect to have impromptu games of volleyball and rounders.
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