We’re delighted to share that Radical Ecology has been awarded a significant core grant by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Arts Fund — a vital commitment that will support us in our continued evolution over the next three years. It’s the first time in our journey that we’ve been able to plan beyond a 12-month horizon, and we’re deeply grateful.
As part of the first cohort of this reimagined fund, we’re honoured to be in brilliant company alongside friends old and new — including Tomorrow’s Warriors and RESOLVE Collective. Massive kudos to PHF’s Head of Programme for Arts, Shoubhik Bandopadhyay who we see blazing a trail with his visionary and values-aligned approach to the arts and what gets funded and we’re thrilled to be on board. Thank you Shoubhik!
This funding allows us to consolidate our team and lean more fully into our studio research model at Webbers Yard, Dartington — where, incidentally, we’ve just said goodbye to our neighbours The Almond Thief and hello to Luna’s Bakehouse with whom we’re looking forward to baking ideas alongside loaves.
Learn more about the Paul Hamlyn Arts fund here ↗
IMAN DATOO: HEAD OF RESEARCH AND COMMUNITY
One major development is the appointment of Iman Datoo as our new Head of Research and Community. Iman has been integral to Radical Ecology since the start — from co-facilitating Equilibrium at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, to exhibiting in Against Apartheid and Invasion Ecology, and developing our low-carbon digital presence as web designer. Most recently, she led on the 100 Year Care Plan, commissioned by Natural England.
The 100 Years Care Plan is a long-term ecological framework that reimagines environmental stewardship as a slow, generational process rooted in collective responsibility, ancestral knowledge, and deep care for land and community.
Rather than responding to crisis with urgency alone, the plan asks us to think in centuries—not seasons—building infrastructures of repair, restoration, and resistance that extend beyond individual lifespans.
As Lead Author of the report, Iman’s vision has profoundly shaped the plan’s ethos. Through her work, she expands the language of care, showing that soil, seeds, and even scent can carry memory, resistance, and futures.
Iman’s practice makes the intangible feel tactile, anchoring the long view of care in grounded, intimate gestures. Without her vision, the Care Plan would be poorer in imagination, and less rooted in the relational, embodied ethics that true ecological repair demands.
Building on the success of this recent collaboration, it makes all the sense to invite Iman now into this leadership role at Radical Ecology — which she’ll hold alongside her LAHP funded PhD spanning UCL Slade, UCL Bartlett and the Eden Project. We’re lucky to have her and we know it!
Download the 100 Year Care Plan here ↗
WE’RE HIRING
With all this in motion, we’re excited to be expanding the team. We’re currently recruiting for the following roles:
Studio & Operations Manager (0.5 FTE, £32,980 pro rata), Deadline: 16 June 2025, 10am UTC +1
Responsible for finance, fundraising, HR and the smooth running of the studio. Works closely with the Director to develop and deliver our weekly and two-year programmes. Also prepares reports for the Advisory Board.
Communications Producer (0.2 FTE, £27,160 pro rata, 6-month contract), Deadline: 16 June 2025, 10am UTC +1
Shapes our communications across all platforms — from Instagram to posters to our website and newsletters. Line managed by the Head of Research & Community, and central to how our work reaches the world.
Studio Assistant Apprentice – Level 3 Business Administration Apprenticeship, 0.8 FTE, £7.70/hour, 32 hours per week [including college day at Exeter College], Deadline: 9 June 2025, UTC + 1
A brilliant entry-level opportunity with Exeter College Apprenticeship Hub. You’ll support all aspects of the studio’s work while developing essential administrative, creative and professional skills. Open to anyone eligible for a Level 3 apprenticeship.
Advisory Board Members (Voluntary), Deadline: 31 August 2025, 10am UTC +1
We’re looking for 5–8 brilliant minds (!!) to help shape our direction and impact over the next 3 years and beyond. Our Advisory Board will be a key accountability tier for the organisation, meeting three times online and once in-person per year. Board members will receive key documents, contribute to strategy, and advise on topics including systems thinking, operations, decolonial and anti-racist environmental agency, fundraising and futurism. Expenses are covered. 1-year term.
🌀 Lots of ways to get involved.
TIME OF THE RIVERS: FELLOWSHIPS UNDERWAY
Our Time of the Rivers research fellowships are now in full flow—an ambitious programme exploring rivers as carriers of memory, resistance, and entangled futures. This initiative brings together artists, activists, and researchers to engage with river ecologies as sites of both colonial violence and radical repair. With the generous support of the British Council and in close collaboration with Borneo Bengkel, the fellowships offer an embodied, place-based approach to thinking with and through water and time.
We are honoured to have the guidance of our extraordinary mentors: Francoise Vergès, whose decolonial frameworks continue to shape the programme’s political grounding; Emma Nicolson, Head of Visual Arts at Creative Scotland, who provides invaluable insight into sustainable practice and strategies for longevity; Dr June Rubis, whose expertise in indigenous methodologies and decolonial environmental politics supports the project’s essential lens; and Celine Lim, Managing Director of SAVE Rivers, whose tireless grassroots advocacy in Sarawak foregrounds the vital connection between environmental justice and Indigenous land rights, reminding the fellowship that river care is inseparable from community sovereignty and resistance to extractive development. . Our fellows, who shone in an exemplary field of nearly 200 applications are Kedisha Coakley, Rizo Leong (of Pangrok Sulap), Syarifah Nahdirah, and Ben Swaby Selig. Coakley’s practice draws on material memory and Caribbean diasporic identity. Leong, a founding member of Pangrok Sulap, activates community woodcut printing as a tool for social commentary and Indigenous advocacy. Nahdirah works across mediums, navigating river systems as ancestral archives and water as a connector of matriarchal knowledge. Swaby Selig engages sound and oral histories to uncover submerged narratives of displacement, resilience and identity. Together, these artists are forging new ways of listening to the earth - beyond metaphor, as a living entity with histories to tell and futures to shape.
We will travel with the fellows to Borneo in June, returning to the UK in July to begin the next phase of inquiry, reflection and synthesis. Their fieldwork will culminate in an online showcase in September, where they’ll share proposals for new work, insights from their time in Borneo & the UK, and provocations for deeper international dialogue around art, ecology, and sovereignty. This is not just a research trip - it’s a call to reframe our ecological relationships and to resist the logic of extractivism that continues to endanger both people and ecosystems around the world. We can’t wait to share more. Watch this space.
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