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We are offering a series of free festivals designed to foster our connection with the natural world. Starting in Spring 2025 and culminating in a winter festival in December 2025, we invite you to celebrate with us in the gorgeous green spaces of Hawbush Community Gardens. The celebrations will deepen our connection to the local landscape and wildlife, through activities that interweave the beauty and power of the seasons with the value of being in community, encouraging us to reflect and participate in nature’s shifts throughout the year. Activities suitable for all ages and abilities will be offered ; nature trails, planting and growing, sound baths, nature crafts, and music. We will explore traditional heritage crafts such as blacksmithing, greenwood work, weaving, fire-bricks and mini chain-making with wire, that connect us to our collective local history. We will celebrate the beauty and wisdom of nature, cultivate wellbeing, and build a stronger, more cohesive community
Reclaim our Roots is a community herbalism project, encouraging participants to engage with the seasonal cycles through the exploration of local plant companions.
In 2024 a group of people came together to explore the herbs growing wild around the site at Hawbush Gardens, to connect with each plant, learning about their virtues and weaving connections between art, community and nature.
At each session we met a chosen plant ally, guiding us into deeper connection through activities like tea tasting and crafting folk medicine while sharing our personal plant stories and collaborative creativity.
We are now planning the next evolution of this project, due to begin again in March 2025. To enquire about participating please email Clare@ekhocollective.com
Pockets of Hope
As part of our Growing Land Connections work with Dudley Peoples School For Climate Justice, Ekho Collective are offering an open invitation to anyone who would like to share their hopes for a more sustainable world.
This year long project beginning in January 2025 warmly welcomes people and groups from Brierley Hill and Dudley Borough and also extends further beyond our local community to connect others from across the UK and even around the world.
Pockets and pouches have long been used to hold items of importance or personal importance. Our ancestors used pouches to carry herbal remedies, flint for cutting, natural cordage and personal items of significance. The introduction of pockets in men's clothing continued this tradition. Historically women's clothing usually lacked pockets partly due to designs favouring fashion rather than function. It was also common for men to carry money, keys and documents reinforcing traditional gender roles thereby reducing independence and ‘undesirable’ assertiveness of women -an embodiment of our patriarchal systems. Women however began using detachable pockets that tied around their waist under or over their skirts to carry their own items until pockets finally became incorporated into actual clothing.
Pockets Of Hope– As children (and adults!) many of us fill our pockets with treasures found in nature, treasures that move us with their beauty and remind us of our place within the natural world. Stones, mosses and feathers for example can all remind us of memories of time spent outdoors and our appreciation and connection to our more than human kin.
Our invitation is to create a pocket from recycled materials, these can take any form and be any size or shape. We would then like you to gift us an item inside your pocket that symbolises your hope for a sustainable world and a flourishing future.
This gift may be a poem, a sketch, your favourite stone, your list of climate activism ideas, a research article, a pic of someone who inspires you or even a personally handcrafted item. A note explaining your gift would also be very welcome but is optional.
Pockets can be posted to us or created and passed on in person during events in and around Dudley or during our festival workshops further afield. All pockets will be curated together at the close of the project into an interactive installation with invitations offered to all pocketmakers to gather together to explore and celebrate our many ways of capturing hope for future generations.
Council of all Beings
Taking inspiration from Joanna Macy - ‘the Work That Reconnects’ and guidance from ‘Coming Back to Life’ (Macy and Brown), Ekho Collective invite you to join us for The Council of All Beings - "to step aside from our human identity and speak on behalf of other life forms." (Macy)
The Council of All Beings will be co-created as a communal ritual with our participants to give voice to our More Than Human Kin. We will gather together for three sessions to embody and creatively represent other life forms that share this planet and give voice in council to their concerns about its destruction. We will then offer the strengths and gifts inherent in each life form to empower us in solidarity and move us to creative action. "And so we awaken today to a new kind of knowledge, a growing comprehension of our connectivity- and even identity- with everything in the universe.”(Macy)
What Does A Functional/ sustainable Village Look Like?
Multi-skilled, Multi-generational, Inclusive, Democratic? Socialist? Activist?
Beyond reducing in both what we take/buy/use time on how do we look at surplus and how we responsibly use any surplus we make/create to the benefit of the village and surrounding areas. Do we link with a food bank or do we advertise on free to collect spaces such as Oleo? Can we donate produce that we have cooked or preserved ourselves. What is the red tape around this?
There are other cultures and places around the world who still practice living as a village. These communities are often secluded away from what is deemed to be normal society.
So the question then is….. is it possible to create a village mentality with in a community that lives among society as a whole but is intentional in doing and being as a village in order to create social change and champion acts of activism on a small but meaningful scale. It takes a Village is a pilot project that can be learnt from and adapted both by ourselves and by way of ripples into wider communities.
Dudley CVS has offered funding for community projects that aim to make Dudley borough an inclusive, welcoming and safe place for everyone. The project is called Cake not hate
Community projects badged as ‘cake not hate’ aim to promote:
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An increased sense of belonging in their local area
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An improved perception of how people from different backgrounds can work together
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A better sense of trust between communities
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Raise awareness on how to report hate crimes
During our summer festival we hosted a workshop space designed to welcome discussion around belonging, unity and community cohesion and signpost to support networks and agencies, along with sharing resources to tackle hate crime.
We started a collective graffiti wall/art piece which will result in a triptych of panels
On June 29th we will hold a celebration of diversity in our Roundhouse in Ekho Wood using cake, art and music as a connecting tool. We will invite our community to tell us who they are, how they identify and what they would like people to understand to help them feel safe and welcome in community.
Our invite will take into consideration the needs of very quiet voices, who may feel uncertain or lack confidence. They can contribute anonymously, use the creations, music or images of people in the public eye as tools to represent their lived experience or ask others to speak on their behalf.
We will invite strong voices to represent themselves and their folk with more personal stories and images, music and poetry.
Together we will create the triptych graffiti/vision installation. A physical large scale art piece packed with insight for others to explore how people who present or experience life differently to themselves feel and how we can all appreciate and value our differences and similarities. Alongside this we will create an audiovisual collation of music, sound and voice.