About us

We're a small, experienced and ambitious team with a strongly collaborative approach.
However big or small your project is, we’re here to work with you to reimagine your land or the land around you.
7 members of the team standing in a London street, in front of a brick wall with windows and brown shutters. The team are smiling towards the camera.

How we work

We are accountable, curious, pragmatic and ambitious in our work with our partners and clients, and with each other.

We enjoy working with you to uncover the key issues you're facing, whether that's about the future management of public parks, the best way to answer a tricky research question or how to organise your group. We are agnostic about different solutions and believe there are many ways of creating a future where land is used for common good.

As a social enterprise, any surplus we make is reinvested in our mission to reimagine the land system. We are building Shared Assets as a self-managing and mutually supportive organisation, where each team member has substantial autonomy. We are a 4-day week organisation and our baseline salary is above London Living Wage.

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How We Work

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Structure and Strategy

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Money and Funding

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The Team

We are a friendly team, distributed around the UK. We have a broad range of skills, experience and aptitudes.

Lead Movement Building Coordinator

Christabel Buchanan

Lead Movement Building Coordinator

Christabel Buchanan

I realised how important land is to transform how we live, and for justice, when I was studying social movements. Since then, I’ve been learning about food sovereignty and anti-austerity movements through studies, land based initiatives, local and regional activism, and gatherings in the UK and Europe. I’ve worked on grassroots action, community development and network facilitation in my previous jobs and I get a lot of energy from being a part of collaborative projects, and from working with passionate people. I’m currently an organiser for the South East region with the Land Workers Alliance.

When I coordinated a participatory action research project using film, it made me realise there’s so much more to organising than collective action, and it got me interested in experimenting with different methodologies and tools for equitable participation, just organisational culture, network building, participatory democracy, and facilitating enabling processes. Shared Assets is a place where creative ideas and interconnectedness are encouraged, so I feel I’ve landed in the right place to keep learning with others!

Lead Consultancy Coordinator

Tom Carman

Tom Carman
Lead Consultancy Coordinator

Tom Carman

I am Shared Assets’ Consultancy Coordinator, supporting the development, management and delivery of consultancy and support projects with local authorities, developers and communities. I have worked across several parts of the land system for over a decade and am a specialist in project development, project management, enterprise support, fundraising and investment.

My 'extra-curricular' land story started through volunteering at a food-growing site in London – being inspired by the potential, culture and connectivity of food-growing spaces and the people involved in them. This led me to co-founding a community-supported agriculture initiative in my hometown, and subsequently becoming a non-exec Director of a veg box scheme which had access to several acres of land and associated land management responsibilities. My professional life has always involved understanding and improving structural aspects of the land system having work in food systems, community development of green spaces, woodland social enterprise, rural development, farming systems and land investment. I’ve seen that with land we can improve people’s welfare, reduce income inequalities and support each other’s health and wellbeing.

Director

Mark Walton

Director

Mark Walton

I specialise in facilitating complex partnerships and supporting people to work together to meet shared objectives. I lead on our consultancy, contributing particularly to supporting clients to develop new business and governance models, as well as supporting specific research projects. Internally, I lead on our finances, strategy and business development.

I founded Shared Assets in 2012 to respond to the need for new models of managing land for the common good in the face of public sector austerity, and to enable groups working on environmental issues to gain access to land to deliver their projects. 10 years of working on land issues directly, and 14 years as an itinerant boater, have brought home the extent to which land is a social and economic justice issue and that how we currently own and govern it lies at the heart of many of the issues we face, from homelessness to climate change. I am excited that we are increasingly working with others to deliver more systemic change through our movement building work.

Lead Research Coordinator

Kim Graham

Kim Graham
Lead Research Coordinator

Kim Graham

I coordinate Shared Assets’ research work, strategy and thinking about how we measure our impact as an organisation embedded in the wider movement for land justice. I’m grateful to have the chance to work alongside communities, clients, activists and academics interested in reimagining our relationship with the land, to generate and share the information we need to build a land system based on the common good.

I came to Shared Assets in 2019, shortly after finishing a Masters in Agroecology and Food Security, doing a course in therapeutic permaculture, and getting involved in various community gardening initiatives. These showed me first-hand how important the sense of belonging, connection and contentment that can come from having your hands in the soil can be for mental wellbeing. I’d been passionate about food sovereignty for many years whilst working elsewhere in the NGO sector but hadn’t always realised how fundamental land is to that and other related struggles. I do now and I feel so excited that my work can contribute to this in some way.

Working at Shared Assets

We are building Shared Assets as a different kind of organisation, with aspirations to grow over the next few years. Find out more about working with us and check if we have any vacancies.

Current Vacancies

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Our Board

Lauren Burnhill

Lauren Burnhill is an experienced practitioner of inclusive, sustainable and responsible investment. Focused on the intersection of environmental and social development, Lauren advocates for long-term financing to unlock climate resilient economic growth for communities worldwide.

In addition to consulting and advisory work, and serving on the board of Shared Assets, she is a Non-Executive Director of Just Share South Africa, an organization that works toward responsible and inclusive investment.

Louise Armstrong

Louise is constantly exploring what it means to live change. She’s a loyal friend, partner, mother and curious human who loves adventure. Louise play multiple roles in different parts of the change ecosystem. and see’s herself as a changemaker, facilitator, systems change designer and process doula.

She has a part time role in a philanthropic foundation, has cofounded The Decelerator and is constantly pollinating and connecting between people and spaces.

Kate Swade

Kate is a creative social and community enterprise consultant with over 15 years’ experience helping local authorities and communities collaborate in stewardship of their environments and neighbourhoods.

After working as our Co-Director for 10 years, Kate is now working with us as a board member. She is also currently launching the Digital Commons Cooperative, a platform providing mapping and data tools to community organisations building a more regenerative world.

Simon Ruston

Simon is a chartered town planner who holds a Doctorate in planning law. He has over a decade of experience in both case and policy work relating to land use for agroecology, sustainable forestry and travelling people. He has also written a number of guides on these subjects in England, Wales and Scotland. He has provided expert evidence in the higher courts and has made a number of appearances at Local Plan inquiries.

Julia Beart

Julia is a freelance consultant with 20 years experience working in the non-profit and social enterprise sector, including roles as a CEO, NED and Trustee. She founded her consultancy practice, Pragmatic Radicals, as a place for people and organisations who want to nurture and transform systems, structures and teams.

She has a passion for transformational governance and has worked with organisations to develop, diversify and strengthen their Boards, shift power dynamics, and embed distributed leadership models.

Associates
and Partners

Sylvia Brown, Lauren Burnhill, Rob Slinger

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