Writing Retreats: Expanding Their Potential

Co-written by Anna Birney and Louise Armstrong.

If we want different futures, we need different narratives. And if we want different narratives, we need the stories and examples that embody and exemplify these. So we must invest in the conditions that allow them to be written.

People doing change work hold enormous amounts of insight, learning, and experience. But so often prioritise and have little protected space or structures to process, articulate and share them. Writing creates an opening between experience and meaning. It allows people closest to the work an opportunity to articulate what change actually feels like as it unfolds, not retrospectively, not extractively, but from inside the work itself.

We’ve now hosted three writing retreats in the UK, the first week of November for the last three years; at beautiful venues, Selgars Mills in Devon, and twice at 42 Acres in Somerset. Two open to changemakers of all forms and last time with a more explicit thematic focus inviting those from the funding ecosystem to come together and share and reflect on their experiments and work.

Each retreat brought together people working across spaces, geographies and practices that in some way aspired to systems change. We’ve been surprised at how far people travelled for these experiences, showing that these sorts of spaces are quite rare. What emerged has not just been writing, but a novel shared experience. People did not come for the community, but they left with a strong sense of being in this work together.

Across the retreats, we’ve seen, deeply personal pieces and professional reflections, early seeds of books, poems, haiku’s, pieces on emergent facilitation, writing in community, leadership, narrative strategy, fragments that later became talks, articles, frameworks, or guiding documents. Some writing named what had been sensed and experienced but never articulated. Some foreshadowed much larger bodies of work. Some simply allowed people to remember themselves. For some it was a chance to pause, reflect and take stock. But there was no expectation or obligation to share or publish. Just trusting that each person would do and take what they needed.

These three retreats have shown us that writing is a foundational change making practice — and that sometimes you need deep dive process, immersion, focus, accountability that being in community brings to catalyse it.

Writing of this depth does not happen easily in the cracks of everyday life. Particularly if you’re just starting to cultivate and develop your voice and practice. This is why retreats matter.

Done well, writing becomes a learning practice, a form of evaluation, a method of inquiry, a narrative intervention, a pause to reflect or end well and see what might come forth and a collective act of sense-making.

Writing retreats aren’t the whole answer, but they are a vital part of a wider ecosystem of learning, changemaking, and care. We’ve identified 4 areas where we think writing retreats can be particularly powerful and have potential to support and be additive to important work and strategies that are happening:

Many of us are used to multi day workshops where we work intensely together and are looking for a shared outcome and set of outputs. This isn’t what the writing retreats are about as each person has space and autonomy to focus on their own experience and writing.

For field building, writing retreats create rare conditions for people working across a field to come together with time, quiet, and relational trust, writing becomes a way to surface the implicit principles, values, and tensions that already shape their work that don’t have the spaces to be explored and too often remain unspoken.

But living and working alongside each other helps to build relational fabric, supporting fields to cohere. Rather than forcing alignment, retreats allow difference, contradiction, and lived experience to sit alongside one another — and from that, more truthful collective narratives can be articulated. The art of walking, cooking, eating together — binding in different ways. It’s tempting to think fields need one truth, but in reality they are made up of a vast array of people, practices and experiences. These fragments and narratives help fields recognise themselves, name what matters, and move with greater coherence without flattening or denying the complexity.

What would it mean if….the burgeoning participatory grantmaking community could come to write about the vast array of ways this is manifesting, those working on place based endeavours across the UK could come together and start to tell tell their stories or for leaders trying to forge different paths, providing an alternative to leadership top-down programmes.

Writing retreats can be especially catalytic for evaluation and learning because they centre those closest to the work as knowledge holders, not data sources.

Too often evaluation often arrived from the outside. Learning partners “came alongside,” or worse, extracted insight after the fact. The people closest to impact were rarely resourced with time, space, or agency to tell their own stories, in their own ways.

In grantmaking contexts, writing retreats offer a powerful alternative to transactional learning and performative accountability. By resourcing time, space, and agency for people to write from within their experience, retreats enable learning to emerge as story, reflection, and sense-making rather than extraction. This supports the development of knowledge systems that can hold complexity, ambiguity, and contradiction. To value meaning alongside measurement. Writing becomes a method for noticing what is actually changing, how it is felt, and why it matters, offering a vital complement to more formal MEL approaches.

This shared reflective space supports more mutual learning, deepens trust, and opens possibilities for shifting how resources are deployed in service of long-term change rather than short-term outputs.

What would it mean if foundations offered writing retreats to their grantees as part of their learning infrastructure? What if this type of approach became part of building relational and people centred funding practices?

Part of the original impetus was inspired by the Community Developmental Resources Association, the community development organisation in South Africa. As part of their closure after 30 years of work, they hosted a writing retreat for anyone who had been impacted or inspired by their work over the years. For former staff, board members, practitioners and partners. It allowed them to curate many different perspectives, experiences and practices about the community development work they’d been developing. A week-long retreat culminated in a set of essays and a year-long event series. They had curated their legacy.

At the School of System Change we see there are a growing number of experienced practitioners who have developed methods, approaches over many years and decades, and yet they don’t always have the time to curate these into learning materials for others, to move their lived experience to contributing and offering it to the field.

With so much flux, change and transition happening in the world and in the changemaking space, including a need for a new wave of elders arising. What would it mean for writing retreats to become a practical way of banking impact and legacy, for creating materials and offerings for evolving fields, allowing deep learning and experience to be seeded far and wide, beyond the direct reach? How might these retreats be supported by creatives, artists, illustrators to bring to life the work for others?

For those working as facilitators, designers, community anchors and creative practitioners in change contexts, writing retreats provide a space for deep recharge, renewal and inquiry. They offer space to step out of constant holding for others and return to one’s own questions, edges, and creative impulses. To be held. Writing in community supports experimentation with form, voice, and perspective, while the presence of others sharpens reflection and expands possibility. Over time, this deepened creative practice feeds back into facilitation and leadership. Enhancing clarity, responsiveness, and the capacity to host spaces where complexity, emergence, and meaning can genuinely be supported.

What would it take to resource facilitators in their own creative renewal; holding space for those who hold space for others?

Writing retreats don’t need to be extravagant, but they do need care. We have developed a few principles and ways of running them that require:

This is not about over-design, but it is holding that is a deep skill in itself, creating the authorising environment for the writing, reflection, connections and creating conditions where something honest and magic can emerge.

These four different purposes and potentials are about legitimising multiple ways of knowing. In an ecosystem that overvalues academic knowledge and research, evaluation as externally written, coming together as having pre-defined outputs and facilitation as just a service not the vital creative energy, we need different ways to invite in our full range of senses, our knowing and being. Our digital lives have flattened and extracted out our learning, whilst change does not just live in our rational mind, it lives in our bodies, images, emotions, contradictions, intuition. Writing retreats honour knowledge to emerge as a living entity, by being in community, eating, walking, exploring, creating together.

We would love to keep hosting these spaces, helping others to do the same. If you are inspired by any of these ideas, have a venue, community or are willing to invest in writing retreats then do get in touch… we see huge potential in the ripple that they have already started.. And we know there is more to come.