An activists’ guide to achieving a better world

Every one of us has the ability to make a lasting and positive mark on the world we want to leave for future generations. And more and more people are responding to the day-to-day challenge of building this better future, as they grasp the opportunity to help create it.

Storm before the calm

One of my guests on Inside Ideas, Laura Storm, is someone the late, great Scottish writer and artist, Alasdair Gray, might have said is ‘acting as if they are living in the early days of a better world’.

Living on a permaculture farm in Portugal with her partner Ulrik, daughter Roxie and son Karlo, Laura was named by the World Economic Forum as a ‘Young Global Leader’ and as one of the world’s leading women in sustainability and regeneration by Sustainable Brands. 

The recognition is well deserved for a passionate innovator who has advised the likes of the Copenhagen Climate Council, the World Business Summit on Climate Change, Project Green Light and Sustainia, on how to show real ‘Regenerative Leadership’, which is the title of the highly acclaimed book she co-authored.

“In many ways, regeneration is very simple, to start to reimagine a world built on life-affirming principles,” she says. “I’m not saying it is not going to be difficult, it will bring about its challenges but once people ‘get it’, then something starts to shift within them.”

In 2018, to show the ‘how’ of doing this, she founded Regenerators – a collective dedicated to nature-inspired regenerative design, leadership and living. It puts the focus on acting in ways which deliver real change, something Laura wants the energy of activists to be directed towards.

“I have so much love for the activist community because these are raw passionate people, they desperately want to make a difference and many would give their life to the movement that they believe in,” Laura says. “But they have so many blind spots in terms of not seeing how they react, how they act, how they interact is causing a lot of degenerative ripples. So I’m very passionate about helping them see what they can’t see, so they can start to create these thriving and regenerative micro-organisms and living systems so that the activist movement and communities can start to transform because we deeply need them.”

This desire to help create the depth of individual leadership within people that allows them to work collaboratively with others to deliver the outcomes and futures everyone wants to see drives Laura every day.

I am delighted to have her on the show to learn more about how we can all go on this journey together.