our Story & evolution
Reclaiming Agency Began its life in 2012
In 2012, the advertising and marketing communications industry was largely unaware of climate change and its relationship to the issue.
Jonathan Wise & Ella Saltmarshe came together to form the Comms Lab and asked the question;
‘How do you inspire an entire industry to transform itself?’
A response was a report that suggested a solution — agencies and media owners could define the kind of world that they wanted to help create, rather than being beholden to what their clients asked of them.
Within the context of the climate emergency, they needed to take control and responsibility for their choices, hence the name of the report: Reclaiming Agency.
Opening Weekend, Spring 2018
Download the report here
If the report was the ‘thinking’ then how to activate the ‘doing’?
The answer was the ‘Reclaiming Agency Leadership Programme’ part funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, a Quaker-based organisation intrigued by the idea of applying values-based leadership within the advertising industry.
Centred on the principle of balancing inner work and outer action, a 6 month leadership programme designed by Emma Ashru Jones, Jonathan Wise & Ella Saltmarshe. Alumni from the first three cohorts led the first wave of change within the industry: becoming sustainability leaders and being responsible for instigating many of the climate-related industry initiatives.
Sustainability and climate has become more established in the industry, yet the level of understanding and ambition is highly variable. We are asking different questions including;
How do change-makers maintain a high-level of ambition and resilience as they navigate a more complex environment?
Reclaiming Agency has evolved into a learning community to support those pushing for substantial change, providing spaces to individually and collectively work with the contradictions and paradoxes we face daily and to continue to create the community needed to navigate them together.
Now we’re in a different time
Summer Weekend, 2022
“What if the way we respond to the crisis the crisis?”
Our intention & guiding principles
Autumn Weekend, 2023
We exist to to harness the power of collective impact and support the growing wave of dedicated sustainability leaders in the creative industry to cultivate meaningful and responsive action towards the climate crisis.
For this to happen, we need honest spaces to come together and attend to our inner selves whilst also being informed by group experiences and wider industry developments.
These principles, informed by the Quaker values (integrity, peace, simplicity, community stewardship of the earth and and peace) — and inquiry and action based learning approaches, help us create the conditions to learn and grow well as a community.
Courageous reflection
& action
Learn from reflecting on doing, one can’t exist without the other, we balance courageous action with reflective practice
emergence over certainty
Work with what’s alive - welcome what’s becoming visible in the moment, embrace the unknown, resist needing to be ‘right’
Learn from & with nature’s wisdom
Be open to our wisest mentor - learn from nature and it’s principles of diversity, humility, interdependence & adaptability
Multiple ways of knowing & being
We can’t think our way out of our crisis - be embrace richer learning from head, heart, body, emotion & all our senses