Frequently Asked Questions

From the Ground Up is a practice and learning space for Black community leaders to move from lived experience to collective action, on their own terms. Through community-rooted learning, experimentation, and practice, it deepens knowledge, relationships and power to act together and remake the ecological conditions shaping their health and futures.

For more details, read the About page.

The From the Ground programme has been designed and developed by Rooted: Centre for Reparative Innovation (formerly Rooted by Design). The programme has been shaped and strengthened through the community leaders who have journeyed with us.

Black ecologies is a way of understanding ecology not as something far away or only about nature, but as the whole texture of life: body and street, home and city, ancestor and future, harm and survival, grief and pleasure, care and power. 

In London, climate and environmental issues are not separate from everyday life. They are felt through damp and overheated homes, polluted roads, unsafe or tiring journeys, unequal access to green and social space, food costs, stress, care responsibilities, development pressures, and the loss or protection of places where community life happens.

Black Ecologies begins with what people already notice and navigate. It asks how the conditions of life in London are shaped by histories of migration, race, housing, labour, planning, public health, care and community resistance — and how people continue to create knowledge, belonging and possibility within those conditions.

Everyday Ecologies is a summer series of gatherings that invite Black community leaders to slow down, notice and reason together about the relationship between people, place, health and power in London.

Everyday Ecologies offers three different ways in - each with a different level of commitment - so leaders can take part in a way that fits their life and work.

Each gathering aims to support leaders to recognise the ecological dimensions of what they are already doing, make connections across shared concerns, and explore what healthier, more liveable futures could look like.

For more information and to get involved, visit the Everyday Ecologies page.

When we say community leaders, we mean established and emerging leaders who work closely with their community. These are individuals involved in forms of care, organising, cultural work, education, health, faith, youth work, neighbourhood support or community infrastructure.

Participants may not hold formal leadership titles or see themselves as organisers. They may be active residents, connectors, carers, cultural workers, faith leaders, youth workers, educators, health and wellbeing practitioners, mutual aid organisers, parent leaders, neighbourhood advocates, community business owners, artists, elders, knowledge holders or people who are trusted locally because they support, connect or hold things together.