Green Man Got Us Thinking
Written by Andrew Westle, National Programme Manager of The Agency of Change.
This August, I took Agency of Change Alumni Joanna, Josa and Joel, to Green Man Festival for a weekend of new experiences, big conversations and something a little different: a session with no stage, no hierarchy and no expert.
More than half of the group had never camped before, and none had ever been to a festival. But they weren’t just there to experience Green Man. They were there to facilitate a session with festival-goers and get people thinking together.
Agency of Change – Building Futures Together wasn’t a lecture. It was a live experiment in collective thinking. We took away the keynote and the singular voice at the front, and asked a different question instead: what happens when people simply think together?
Our Alumni facilitated the session, with no real script beyond that. Participants shaped the conversation as it happened, opening up questions around power, ecology, justice and intergenerational futures.
There was friction. There was honest, sometimes uncomfortable dialogue. And there were no neat conclusions, because that was never really the point.
This was about trying out new ways of thinking together, and treating imagination not as an individual gift, but as a collective muscle. One that gets stronger the more we use it.
And for me, part of what made the weekend so special was watching Agency Alumni do it.
They had stepped into completely unfamiliar territory, tents, music, sun, people, and then turned around and held space for strangers to wrestle with some pretty big questions. It was a real reminder of what this work is about.
We love working with organisations and people who create opportunities that are genuinely new. Spaces that open things up and make room for conversations that might not otherwise happen.
We also came away from the weekend having met some brilliant people, including British politician Zack Polanski, Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, and being reminded, once again, why we do this work - not to hand down answers, but to create the conditions for people to find their own.
So, rather than wrapping this up with an answer, we’ll leave you with some of the questions we explored at Green Man Festival:
What do we want to pass on?
If a teenager walk in from 2076, what would they ask us?
Who do we have power over?
What is your relationship with the ground you’re standing on?
What is something a younger person taught you recently?
