We Begin with the Future: Our Team Days with the Centre for Alternative Technology's Innovation LAB

Photographs by the team; words by Rach Coleman

This post is written in gratitude to the Centre For Alternative Technology's Innovation Lab and Dr Ruth Stevenson for facilitating our team days, and Plas y Brenin for hosting us.

At the start of September, with autumn still feeling a little way off but the end of 2026 calling, the TFTHQ team gathered at Plas y Brenin, our home-from-home in North Wales, for our annual team days.

The primary aim of our team days is to spend time together. As a distributed organisation we live far apart, and despite genuinely enjoying one another's company we rarely get the chance to be together. Some of us hadn't seen one another this side of the new year.

Our Team Days are also a time for reflection; a time to take stock, to consider the lessons of the year so far outside of the crazy pace of projects and events, and to look together at our vision and ask - what do we need to do to bring this closer to reality?

As well as spending time together on the hills, we also created our own 'TFT Classroom' to dream into what the future holds for our work, and begin work on our new 2027-2031 Strategy.

We're a small team, which means our roles often dance between these kind of strategic questions and the day-to-day work of making our projects happen. I'm really proud of this, as it celebrates our individual creativity and the importance we place on working collaboratively. It does mean however that sometimes it's hard to make plans long-term - we get, what we call, 'stuck in the weeds' instead of looking at the whole Trash Free Trails ecosystem.

Enter Dr Ruth Stevenson and the Centre For Alternative Technology's Innovation Lab. This group of researchers and facilitators come together to support organisations, businesses and communities to attend to complex social and environmental problems. The Lab design and host unique workshops that draw on specific practices and ideas that help teams like ours move through the sticky, complex middle of their work, coming together around a shared creative sense of what the future looks like.

Ruth was our facilitator. She's warm, funny and firm - she reigned us in as much as she let us leap, giving us space to unpack our thoughts with generosity, while bridging the different perspectives from which we arrive at TFT. Rich described how invaluable Ruth was for our planning sessions really well on our Instagram; 'she didn't have all the questions or indeed answers. But she helped us discover ourselves, how we work and fill in the gaps we didn’t know existed.'

We moved through a 'backcasting' process - starting at 2031, and working back in time from our, and our community's, end point. It felt thrilling and uplifting to be there in the future with our volunteers, our partners, the friends we work with at other NGOs and charities - and with nature too.

Starting at the end had so many benefits - enabling us to make tangible what before had felt unclear - but what stuck out for me was the sense of hope it instilled in me.

We're a tiny organisation working in an unprecedented time. The need for environmental stewardship and care has never been greater - but it's also moving further and further down the priority list in the face of other global crises and challenges. It is surreal to me, having joined the team in 2022 when it seemed like environmental awareness was only growing, to be where we are now, nature still an afterthought.

But I came away from our team days with so much hope - I still feel it as I write about the experience. Thanks to the process Ruth guided us through the future is not only tangible - but practically possible. We're less than a year away from the Deposit Return Scheme, which will transform the state of our trails. Just two weeks ago we rallied 100 young riders in Bristol to clean up their beloved pump tracks. Our ambassadors are heading out with their communities this autumn to showcase the power of citizen science and clean up the places they love.

Stewardship is a small act - but it's meaningful. The future for us sees it happening everywhere - on every trail, within every community. The hope that keeps us going, is seeing where this is already happening. As we dive back into our 2027-2031 Strategy, full of stakeholder maps and timelines and gantt charts - this is what I'll hold to heart. The future is already here in wild places and communities across the UK and beyond.

Special thank you to Dr Ruth Stevenson for facilitating the team, keeping us focused on the task and making sure we didn't take too long over our tea and biscuits. Thank you to CAT's Innovation Lab for the planning and preparation they did for the workshop. We wouldn't be where we are without you!