Rootwork was a collaboration between Lumos Transforms and Healing Justice Ldn, supported through the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Emerging Futures programme.
Created in response to rising instability, polarization, burnout, and fragmentation across social change ecosystems, Rootwork explored a simple but consequential premise: systems do not transform themselves, people do. If we hope to build more just, liberatory futures, we must attend not only to strategies, structures, and institutions, but also to the internal and relational conditions from which those futures are imagined, organized, and sustained.
This series brings together reflections from participants, partners, and collaborators across the UK who engaged with Rootwork. Together, these pieces explore what becomes possible when embodied practice is brought into the work of social change, collective resilience, and the long project of liberation.
Following her participation in Rootwork, ecological economist and Doughnut Economics author Kate Raworth reflects on embodiment, cooperation, trust, and the capacities needed to build more collective and life-serving economies.
About the author
Kate Raworth (she/her) is an ecological economist and author of the internationally best-selling book Doughnut Economics: seven ways to think like a 21st century economist, which has been published in over 20 languages and has been influential with audiences ranging from the UN General Assembly and Pope Francis to David Attenborough and Extinction Rebellion. She is also co-founder of Doughnut Economics Action Lab, and Senior Teaching Fellow at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute.
