Person: Sue Palmer

How do communities imagine and create more sustainable, healthy, and equitable futures? 

This question sits at the heart of the Civic Imaginaries research project. While much discussion about climate action and the ‘civic’ focuses on cities, rural communities are also developing innovative ways to respond to environmental and social challenges. In this guest blog, Sue Palmer from Edventure Frome explores how rural communities that are frequently overlooked in national conversations, imagine change and build the capacity to make it happen. Sue’s work develops through collaboration, reflection, and shared learning, highlighting the everyday practices of civic imagination: bringing people together, creating space for new possibilities, and finding practical ways to act collectively for healthier and more resilient futures. 

Edventure Frome’s Future Shed has just launched a brand new set of free resources specifically for rural communities. These are a result of our five year National Lottery Climate Action funded Green and Healthy Frome programme, which focused on climate and health in the Somerset market town of Frome. A partnership between Edventure, Frome Medical Practice and Frome Town Council, we delivered a broad programme of work around housing, energy, health and active travel alongside community-led action.

There’s a real gap in guidance for rural community engagement. Most of what exists assumes a more urban audience and doesn’t account for how community-led climate action looks and feels like in rural places. Rural communities are often ignored for their role in climate action. They can be more disconnected and distanced from contemporary culture changes and the urgency of the climate crisis. This can result in some people actively resisting important strategies such as nature regeneration and re-imagining food production – which are absolutely key to climate solutions. Urban centres tend to take more of the focus, perhaps because the groups and networks in cities are more visible, and their larger populations are in greater physical proximity. However, especially when linked together, rural communities have incredible capacity to support and enable change, particularly in relation to food systems, nature and ecology, energy and resilience. And the proximity of people to each other in many rural communities, often a few minutes walk away from each other, creates highly connected communities.

We co-created resources with rural changemakers from Midsomer Norton, Farrington Gurney, Coleford, Stalbridge, Timsbury and Chippenham to address our collective insights about the very particular but under-appreciated aspects of community-led changemaking in countryside contexts. 

Over six months through the winter and spring of 2025-26, led by Edventure’s Esther Maughan McLachlan, we explored our personal experiences of what rural changemaking takes to enact. We recorded conversations and interviews as a way of sharing different perspectives – the messiness and challenges as well as the opportunities and successes. We imagined people might be listening at their own kitchen tables, interested and hopefully inspired by the experiences of other rural places. We asked each other questions on topics such as: 

• “How do you bring the topic of climate into the room?”
• “When can ‘climate’ be more of a stumbling block than an opportunity?” 
• “What resistances to climate action have we experienced in rural communities and how have we worked with or around them?”

The resources developed from these questions and conversations are a series of practical podcasts and a curated directory. They are designed to support individuals and organisations in a wide range of rural changemaking and green initiatives and cover actions such as: engaging rural communities, connecting with key stakeholders such as the local council and GP surgery, understanding why rural changemaking functions differently, and is sometimes harder than most national guidance assumes. 

The rural changemaker’s work demonstrates that civic imagination is not simply about envisioning a different future; it is also an important example of how people in diverse places enact change from the ground up. The stories, reflections, and practical guidance shared in our resources show how rural communities are already shaping more sustainable and connected futures. They expand our understanding of what civic imagination looks like in practice and remind us that transformative change often begins with conversations around kitchen tables, local networks, and the collective belief that things can be different.

The resources are free and genuinely practical and we’re keen to share them! Let us know what you think? If you’d like to get in touch to find out more, please contact: ruralchangemakers@edventurefrome.org

Sue Palmer

Sue Palmer is an artist and creative producer working across media and form, often making art with other people and places in the UK and internationally. Current live work includes Common Salt and Atmospheric Forces with artist Sheila Ghelani. Awarded a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship in 2016, Sue has worked extensively in parks and civic green spaces, and for environmental organisations. Based in Frome Somerset, Sue also works in community and movement building around climate in her home town, and as the lead for Edventure’s Future Shed in the partnership programme Green and Healthy Frome. Rural Changemakers is one of the pieces of work to come out of this programme.

www.inquilines.com
@suepalmer_23