Written by Molly Haywood Newberry, Network Development Manager, Network of Wellbeing
On 5th May 2026, I went to the book launch of The Elgar Companion to Creating a Regenerative Economy for Wellbeing – and left feeling something I hadn’t quite expected: radical hope. Not the naive kind. The grounded, evidence-based kind that comes from realising that building wellbeing together from the ground up is not only possible – it is already growing, quietly, in communities across the UK and beyond. The central message was both simple and profound: we created the systems and stories we live by. And if we created them, we can reimagine them. The question is not whether it’s possible. The question is: when will more of us feel powerful enough to begin to turn the tide ourselves.
Measuring Wellbeing Instead of Wealth
The speaker and co-author, Professor Kristín Vala Ragnarsdóttir, described something scientists call the ‘Great Acceleration.’ Since around 1950, humanity has been on a path of exponential resource use, economic growth and environmental damage. As we all know, greenhouse gas emissions have rocketed. Species are disappearing faster than at any point in recorded history. We have now breached seven out of nine planetary boundaries – the critical thresholds that define the safe operating conditions for life on Earth. This is not a future problem. It is already here.
And yet the story we keep being told is this: as long as the economy is growing, we’re doing fine.
GDP – Gross Domestic Product, has become our headline measure of success. But GDP doesn’t tell us whether children are healthy, whether people feel happy or connected to their neighbours, whether rivers are clean, air is clear and people have access to thriving green spaces. In fact, GDP actually rises when we cut down a forest, build a prison, or treat a preventable illness. It measures transactions – not wellbeing. Not happiness. Not life.
The Genuine Progress Indicator – a far more holistic alternative – tells a very different story. It factors in inequality, environmental damage and social wellbeing, and it shows that for most Western nations, genuine progress effectively stalled in the 1970s. We have been getting richer on paper while becoming, in many of the ways that truly matter, much, much poorer.
The good news? Countries including Iceland, New Zealand, Scotland and Wales are already developing wellbeing frameworks – measuring different markers of progress: mental health, community connection, childhood outcomes, ecological health.
Economist Kate Raworth’s ‘Doughnut Economics’, offers a beautiful and revolutionary model: imagine a doughnut, where the hole in the middle represents the people falling below a basic quality of life – without enough food, housing, healthcare or connection – and the outer edge represents the planetary boundaries which we must not breach. The goal is simple: get everyone into the doughnut, and thrive there.
These frameworks exist. The knowledge exists. What’s needed now is the public will to demand and make them reality. And that power starts with us. You and me. Our street, our friends, our town.
Becoming Stewards of the Land
But measuring wellbeing of people alone means nothing if we continue to treat the natural world as a raw material. Woven through our economic story is an older and even more damaging one: that land, rivers, forests and animals exist purely for exploitation and fundamentally, that what they can generate financially will always matter more than their inherent value. In treating the Earth as something we own, we are destroying the very systems that keep us alive. Our exploitation of nature isn’t separate from our own survival. It is the threat to it.
The good news: this is changing. The global movement for Rights of Nature is growing – rivers, forests and ecosystems are being granted legal protections in Ecuador, New Zealand and Colombia. Nature is beginning to have a voice in the laws that govern what we do to it.
Closer to home, the Right to Roam campaign is fighting for something that used to be part of our culture: the right of people to access the land they live on. Right now, the public has legal access to less than 8% of England’s land, while vast swathes of countryside – moorland, woodland, rivers and coastline – sit behind the fences of a tiny number of private landowners. Scotland has shown what’s possible with its Land Reform Act, giving people responsible access to most land and waterways. Now England needs to catch up.
Because you cannot care about what you cannot connect to. Open access to nature isn’t a luxury – it’s how we grow a generation of people who love the land enough to become its stewards.
The People Are Not Powerless
The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a tiny global elite doesn’t exist because it’s natural or inevitable. It exists because our current laws allow it to – tax havens, unchecked corporate power, the privatisation of everything from water to public transport. These are political choices. And political choices can be changed.
But here’s what gives me the most hope: we don’t have to wait for governments to change them. Because systems change from the grassroots upwards – they always have. Every major shift in modern history began not with a law, but with ordinary people talking to each other, refusing to accept the world as it was and acting collectively.
And the most powerful thing we can do – right now, today – is to stop funnelling our energy, money and trust into distant corporations, and start pouring it back into the places and people around us. Community initiatives: gardens, repair cafés, food cooperatives, skill-sharing networks, community fridges, seed swaps, litter picks, clothes swaps, share-libraries, time banks, transition towns, eco-villages. These are not small or marginal things. They are the seeds of a different story and they are already rooting and spreading.
The Proof Is Already Out There
All over the UK, communities are quietly getting on with building the world we need:
In Totnes, Devon – the birthplace of the global Transition Towns movement – over 40 community-led projects have been launched, including a community energy company and affordable housing initiatives. People come from around the world to see what’s possible.
In Brixton, a community group raised £130,000 to install the UK’s first inner-city community-owned solar power station on top of a council estate.
In Leeds, LILAC is a co-housing community of 20 eco-build households, collectively owned and permanently affordable, built from straw bale panels and powered by solar energy.
In Pembrokeshire, the Lammas eco-village has transformed depleted pasture into a thriving mosaic of food growing, beekeeping, woodland crafts and renewable energy – entirely community managed.
On the Isle of Eigg, Scotland, the community grew so fed up with neglectful absentee landlords that they crowdfunded and bought their island outright – it has since become the first place in the world to provide constant electricity from renewable wind, sun and hydro power, with a thriving, growing population and all decisions made democratically by the community itself.
In Belfast, Northern Ireland, ‘Grow NI’ runs community growing spaces across the city, on a mission to grow ideas and practices for affordable, sustainable food and living, improving wellbeing and reducing social isolation through care and connection. Growing food. Growing community. One raised bed at a time.
In Gloucester, the Gloucestershire Gateway Trust partnered with the Westmorland Family to create Gloucester Services – a UK first – where a family business and a local charity jointly own a motorway service station, with profits flowing directly back into local communities. Proof that businesses can be designed from the ground up to feed their communities rather than extract from them.
In Todmorden, West Yorkshire, Incredible Edible began in 2008 by simply planting food in public spaces without permission – a quiet act of revolution, a peaceful and productive protest – using the act of growing food together to spark conversation, action and to rebuild a community fighting food poverty. It has since inspired over 700 community food projects across the UK and worldwide.
These are not pipe dreams. They are living, breathing proof that a different way is not only possible – it’s already growing. The movement just needs more hands, minds and hearts to be part of the blossoming story.
But What Can I Do?
I know that the scale of the challenges I’ve been describing can feel overwhelming. I know that starting and sustaining community initiatives can be a challenge in itself. But community action is not a few people desperately building sandcastles against a tide – it is the tide itself. We are the tide. We just have to be brave enough to know that we can turn it, for ourselves if we choose to. Change has always come from people who decided to take action – no matter how small – towards the change they wanted to see in the world. No longer waiting and hoping. Acting with radical hope.
Here is what history tells us, over and over: communities move first. The Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Rights, LGBTQ+ equality – none of these tidal shifts began in parliament. They began in kitchens and community halls, with ordinary people finding each other, deciding that enough was enough and taking action. Policy followed – sometimes decades later. It always does, once the tide has already been turned by the masses.
So here is my simple, wholehearted call to action whoever you are and wherever you live:
If you can find it – join it. If you can’t find it – make it.
Find the organisations working for the things you believe in. Show up. Offer your hands, your time, your skills – not necessarily your money, just you. Swap and share and grow with the people around you. Stop waiting for someone else to build the neighbourhood, the community, the world you want to live in.
It is time to let go of the isolated, passive consumer story and step into something far richer and far older: the story of people who make things together, look out for each other, and build the world they truly want future generations to inherit. There is no ‘us and them’ in that story. There is only us. Humankind – being kind to ourselves, to each other and to the earth. Because we belong to each other. We belong to this earth. And somewhere beyond the noise and petty divisions, every single one of us already knows it.
It’s time to start acting like it.
How Can You Get Involved?
- Doughnut Economics Action Lab – Meet and join a community of pioneering changemakers from across the globe who are turning Doughnut Economics from a radical idea into transformative action.
- ADoddle – Find local support and opportunities within your community
- Eden Project Communities: Month of Community – Find or set up a community event near you this June 2026
- GoVO – Volunteering opportunities across the UK
- Right to Roam – Join the campaign to open up Britain’s land
- Together – Rebuilding trust and collective power from the ground up
- BorrowMore – Find repair and lending organisations near you
Inspirational References from Article
Global: Transition Towns Movement – https://transitionnetwork.org/
Brixton: Repowering London – https://www.repowering.org.uk/our-story/
Leeds: LILAC eco-build co-housing community – https://www.lilac.coop/
Pembrokeshire: Lammas eco-village – https://lammas.org.uk/en/welcome-to-lammas/
Isle of Eigg, Scotland: Community Buyout – https://isleofeigg.org/ieht/community-buyout/
Belfast, Northern Ireland: Grow NI – https://growni.enthuse.com/profile
Todmorden, West Yorkshire: Incredible Edible – https://www.incredibleedible.org.uk/
Gloucester: Gloucestershire Gateway Trust & Gloucester Services – https://gloucestershiregatewaytrust.org.uk/about/our-story/