If I had to put a date on it I would say that it was May 2011 when Shared Assets was conceived, in a disused former Subway franchise and pizza take-away outlet in Exmouth Market in London. This glamorous location was the meanwhile-use venue for POPse!, a one-week-only pop-up social enterprise think tank.

I was reminded of this origin story the other week as I happened to walk down Exmouth Market and passed that very same shop front - once again shuttered - on my way to a meeting of the Shared Assets staff and board where we were aiming to finalise how the governance of Shared Assets would function after my departure at the end of September this year.

It was a poignant moment of reflection as I considered how I’d, somewhat inadvertently, become the co-founder of an organisation that, 14 years later, I was preparing to step away from.

POPse! itself arose in the aftermath of the arrival of the Coalition government in 2010 and the financial crisis of 2008. It felt like the old economic order was collapsing and new ideas were needed. Public sector austerity was really starting to bite, and from April 2011 an awful lot of folks who had worked in government or quangos or NGOs were suddenly no longer employed. So some of us came together for a week in a disused sandwich shop to think about how we might shape the future.

The new government had announced that it was moving the ownership and management of Britain’s publicly owned waterways into a new charity that would become the Canal and River Trust. It had also suffered a ferocious public backlash that had forced it to back down from its plans to sell off the public forest estate. Meanwhile cash strapped local authorities were closing libraries and community centres and considering whether they could still manage non-statutory services such as parks.

It was clear that the state was no longer going to manage much of the land that we held dear, and yet the public was in no mood for it to be sold off or privatised. New models of community ownership and management were going to be needed. And whilst the government was also consulting on what would become the Localism Act of 2011, creating new rights for communities to take on the management of assets and services, these were focused on buildings such as libraries and pubs. There was little mention of land, parks, or forests.

So at POPse! I was hosting a half day session to think about what a “21st century commons” might look like and whether we needed the Localism Act to include a new “Community Right to Manage” land. The roundtable session we held as part of the event was attended by a wise and experienced civil servant who advised us against campaigning for policy change in England where land was concerned: “too many vested interests”. He suggested we should focus instead on working with individual landowners - public and private - to bring these new models into being.

So Shared Assets was created to do just that.

I co-founded Shared Assets with my friend and colleague Ben Metz who I had previously been working with on The Waterways Project which was focused on influencing the establishment of the new waterways charity. We convinced Lorraine Hart, Matt Leach and Maria Adebowale to join the board and, with funding from Tudor Trust, were able to quickly employ Kate Swade. We rented a small office space and started to work out exactly what it was we had just created!

The Tudor Trust funding enabled us to provide free business development support to community groups who were looking to try and own or manage land. Within the year we had been commissioned by Forest Research to undertake our first piece of research into woodland social enterprise in Britain, and within two we had been commissioned by Camden Council to explore the potential for an alternative funding and governance mechanism for some of London’s flagship parks. The shape of Shared Assets as a small consultancy and research organisation with a focus on community ownership and governance of land was established. Soon we were describing ourselves as a “think-and-do tank”.

Right from the start though - alongside the actual work - Kate and I were interested in how we might create a “healthy organisation”. By this we meant an organisation that supported people to live good lives. An organisation where people - including us - would want to work. We became Co Directors, sharing the responsibilities of leadership, and in 2016 when we converted to a CIC we designed the governance to ensure that when we both left, leadership, and responsibility, could be expanded further across the staff team. Kate wrote in detail about this in her own leaving blog.

It was around 2019-20 when the next significant shift occurred for the organisation. We had long been concerned about the lack of diversity within the land justice movement - especially when the land system is so firmly at the heart of imperialism, colonialism and our class system. During this period, as we reviewed our theory of change, it was clear that our existing consultancy and research services would not address this on their own. We started to develop what has become a movement building workstream; working to deepen and broaden the land movement, to centre the voices, experience and leadership of those most marginalised by it, and to facilitate spaces where organisations and individuals working for a more just land system could work together across our differences to build relationships and jointly strategise.

Over time we developed an approach to system change rooted not in lobbying vested interests for change, but in supporting the development of a grassroots movement of practitioners, activists, and progressive landowners and resource holders. We started to think of ourselves not as a small consultancy, or a think-and-do tank, but as “infrastructure for an emerging land movement”. We acted as a fiscal host and support for emerging organisations such as LION and the Right To Roam Campaign, and we worked with others to establish new organisations to fill gaps in the current movement infrastructure such as Digital Commons Cooperative and Land Match England.

Internally we sought to deepen our approach to self-management and to create a more just and equitable working environment that models the world we are trying to create. We instituted a four day week, flattened the organisational hierarchy, established a flat pay structure based on paying the average 5-day UK wage for a 4-day week, and developed a sociocratic and consent-based approach to decision making.

It was never my intention that Shared Assets would be my retirement plan. From the outset I always felt I wouldn’t be entirely personally and professionally satisfied until I had left and the organisation was working well without me. There was a short period where Kate and I would occasionally pull each other to one side and say “I just want to you know that I’ve applied for a new job”, but in the end Kate made the typically wise and generous decision to make a planned exit, and suggested that her departure should be the start of my own transition out of the organisation. That was three years ago now, the transition prolonged by a cashflow crunch that put our plans on ice for several months.

But after a long - and sometimes bumpy - transition period, the end of my time at Shared Assets is in sight. I will be leaving the organisation at the end of September and am doing so full of confidence in the team and the board. We have a new strategy and the sociocratic structures and processes we have put in place have been running for some time, and have demonstrated that collective approaches to decision making can work in challenging times. Two or three team members will be joining the board after I depart.

Back in the early days of Shared Assets we used to talk and write about how land was an invisible issue in our politics, not discussed by any of the main political parties let alone by ordinary people in the pub. That has changed. Fifteen years of ongoing austerity, Brexit, climate change, the housing crisis, biodiversity loss, the increasing reckoning with our colonial and imperialist past at home, and the rise of that same colonial imperialism internationally, including Israel’s ongoing genocidal land grab in Gaza, mean that land is no longer an invisible underpinning of the current system that we cannot talk about, but one that is increasingly part of the collective conversation. The number of organisations, thinkers, writers and activists with an understanding of, and a focus on, the injustices of our current land system has proliferated.

I’m not yet confident that funders and political elites recognise that there is no just transition without a just land system, but I see a more diverse and connected land movement emerging that does. One that is articulating and demonstrating that in a wide variety of ways, and one that is developing new models of ownership and stewardship which show us every day what that more just future might look like in practice. I hope that Shared Assets, for as long as it's useful to do so, can continue to act as infrastructure for that movement.

Personally I am looking forward to a bit of a break in the autumn before diving into the freelance world. I will continue to do bits of work as an associate for Shared Assets where that can be useful, but my intention is to focus on building on the work that Kate and I have been developing through the Corporate Bodies Substack and podcast series, supporting organisations that are looking to create more inclusive and participative cultures, structures, and ways of working.

In doing so I know that I am leaving Shared Assets in the safest of hands, and you can get in touch with Caio Katz if you want to discuss our Advice and Support work, Kim Graham for our Research, Christabel Buchanan for our Movement Building, Janna Aldaraji to find out more about Data for Social Justice and Hannah Fenton to talk Resourcing and Relationships.

But from me, for now, its Bella Ciao.