About us
The Slow Work Garden was borne of a quietly fertile period of wintering in both of our lives. For us, it is an opportunity to work with the shifts that we believe are necessary to participate in a regenerative culture of living and working.
We have been working and participating in learning journeys together for the last seven years, and throughout our work we have both uncovered just how critically important it is to slow down, even when every impulse is to do the opposite. We are glad and excited to come together on this project.
The Slow Work Garden is a joint venture but also deeply personal for each of us — read on to find out more about our individual WHYs.
Lucy (left) and Sophie (right) in the woodlands at Schumacher College on the Dartington Estate.
Sophie’s WHY
I am a creative and multidisciplinary freelance learning designer and facilitator with a background in research, anthropology and alternative educational experiences. Head to makingsenseofchange.com to find out more about my work outside of The Slow Work Garden.
Slowing down was at first forced upon me by the growing sense of disconnect from my body, worsening mental health and lack of creativity I felt during a few years working full time in London. Having grown up fairly feral in the countryside, I slowly realised I needed time and space from work to feed my whole soul, and so moved to Cornwall in 2020 and went freelance to take back control of my pace and space. Since doing so, I’ve also begun weaving the threads of systems change, slowing down, mental health, depth over breadth, creativity and environmental regeneration. For me, this project represents an opportunity to join the effort in slowing the tide of modernity that is so destructive to us and to our home.
Lucy’s WHY
I’ve worked in education and learning for 17 years, and my experience brings together learning design, creative facilitation, inner work and organisational systems change. Through my work, I’m experimenting with emergent ideas in learning and organisational design, and developing practices in cyclical organising and slowing down, inclusive and regenerative practice, and reorienting towards purpose.
My own journey of slowing down involves toxic work cultures, burnout and more recently death, grief, and the subsequent knowing in my body that slow work and deep inner learning is critical to practise and pursue. I’ve seen how work plays a huge part in growing and shaping us as humans, but also how difficult it is for organisations and individuals to recognise and give space to inner work alongside outer work. For me, this project represents a way of doing better in welcoming, nourishing and growing the humans we all need to be now, for the future.