Lucy (left) and Sophie (right) in the woods at Schumacher College in late 2022, as ideas for The Slow Work Garden first took seed.

Sophie Craven

I am a creative and multidisciplinary freelance learning designer and facilitator with a background in research, anthropology and alternative educational experiences.

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.

Lucy Williams

I’ve worked in education and learning for nearly 20 years, and my experience brings together learning design, facilitation, inner work and systems change. My work now is about creating spaces to ‘not make sense’, and helping myself and others to notice and navigate the (inner and outer) contradictions of living and working in these times. Through this work, I’m experimenting with emergent ideas in learning design and facilitation, and developing practices in slowing down and cyclical living, working and learning. You’ll also often find me tending to my actual garden (a love passed onto me from my late mum), and walking in the woods near my home with my dogs Phyllis and Prue.

My route here involves dysregulated and hyper-speedy work cultures, burnout and more recently multiple bereavement, cumulative grief, late-discovered autism, and the subsequent knowing in my body and soul that slow work and deep inner learning are critical to practise and pursue in community.

Maria Dorthea Skov

I’m a community organiser and facilitator, and keen nature wanderer, meditator and Lego builder, based in South East London, born in Denmark. My work is about creating and enabling spaces of connection and collective care, contemplation and conversation.

In this past year I’ve hosted Living The Good Life – a peer group experiment in leisure, play and rest as the source of personal and societal transformation. That journey, and my interest in slow work practices, was born out of a longstanding frustration with our productivity and profit-driven society. I found it impossible to ‘keep up’ whilst keeping well and sane. I studied leisure management and realised how even our free time has been corrupted and commercialised.

My dream is a society that centres leisure, joy, play, and creativity, where we can ‘be’ more than ‘do’ and slow down enough to know what we must work on and how. My interest now is to co-create processes of learning and unlearning, individual and collective exploration, that can help us get there, together.

Christina Watson

I’m a Brighton-based learning designer, facilitator and collective imagination practitioner. I’m also a song sharer, sea swimmer and proud aunt. I’ve spent the last 15 years designing and delivering educational programmes for young people and adults, ranging from mental health to climate action and creative arts. My work now focuses on re-connection – to ourselves, to each other and to the earth.

My route to this work began with early childhood bereavement and a lifelong relationship with grief. After a period of burnout recovery, I’ve spent the last two years taking a deep-dive into grieving in community, training in grief tending and hosting Death x Life – a creative exploration of our relationship with death, loss and grief. I’m obsessed with the power of peer-to-peer spaces to cultivate the acts of resistance, learning, support and collective care we desperately need to face these times.