🔥 Losing Control 2025 Unconference

 

Power. Place. Participation. Letting go to move forward.

The world is increasingly complex and its challenges increasingly urgent. So, we have decided to bring back Losing Control from its post pandemic hibernation!  Will you join us?

Losing Control is not your typical conference. It’s a gathering for the brave, the frustrated, and the hopeful — for people working inside, outside, and around the system who know that top-down change is broken… and that something else is urgently needed.

We are facing deep political uncertainty, spiralling inequality, and stretched resources, many of us are under pressure to hold on tighter. The far right is organising in our neighbourhoods and regions, our funding flows are getting tighter and smaller and everyone working in the space is exhausted. But what if the answer isn’t to control more — but to let go, together?

This year (date TBC) over 2 days in Birmingham, we’ll be bringing together:

• Grassroots groups and local organisers
  
• Progressive funders whether they represent endowed foundations, wealth holders or corporate foundations
  
• Courageous commissioners supporting community assets
  
• Place-based partnerships, anchor institutions and civic innovators
  
• Movements, misfits and changemakers across sectors
  

We’re finalising the details for this event, sign up here to be get notified as soon as tickets are available.

 

The Big Questions We’ll be Asking

Together and in our separate spaces, we’ll explore the questions that matter now:

• How do we tackle the challenges of the far right? Including how we organise our assets to support the coming tensions alongside training and capacity building to organise against it. 
• How do we fund and support work that’s relational, emergent, and rooted in place?
• How do we deploy resources at scale and move assets into the hands of civil society?
• What does power-sharing look like between funders, councils, and communities?
• How do we hold complexity without defaulting to control or collapse?
• What can place-based work teach us about reimagining democracy from the ground up?
• How do we challenge the growing far right movement?

There is a lot of work to do, time is precious and this gathering does not aim to add to the increasing pressure we are facing. Instead, we want to take a different approach 

Be the first to know when tickets become available >>>