Making Change Collective  is made up of facilitators/educators who have a range of experience in teaching, facilitating, activism and community organising. The workshops we run draw strongly on the work we have each done in the past, and on our particular backgrounds and experiences of systems of oppression.

We each have other jobs, projects, family concerns, health issues and life issues going on, so our work is intermittent and we create workshops that are responsive to the needs for popular education as they arise. We’re mostly based in Bristol, UK.

Current facilitators 

Jay Wilkinson has been running popular education workshops since 2005, after learning about how incredible popular education is from a seminar run by the Trapese Collective. Since then, Jay has employed popular education in numerous settings, from beginner’s literacy for migrant adults, to permaculture & social change workshops, climate workshops, queer/trans workshops, questioning privilege workshops, and more latterly, workshops on democracy, the effects of neoliberalism on our ways of being, and how to organize for change. Jay’s workshops are run as part of broader facilitation & social change work, such as migrant solidarity, community gardening, environmental activism and democracy activism.

Clare Bonetree is a facilitator and trainer, a member of the Turning the Tide training network, a mediator with the Radical Routes network of housing co-operatives, and works in the voluntary sector on inclusion and inequality. Clare’s main interests are in supporting people to develop the inner skills to work effectively to tackle injustice in the world, their sense of connection to themselves and all beings, and their understanding of power within themselves, between each other, and in relation to others.

Adam Herriott is a trade unionist, researcher/writer, and social movement/political campaigner working on reform of our democratic structures and transformation for system change. He was active in the radical environmental movement from 2013 to 2015, and ran workshops on radical environmentalism and strategy. He joined the Making Change Collective in 2018 and has run a variety of popular education workshops with Jay Wilkinson at festivals, the local social centre and online during the pandemic.

Previous facilitators

Alice Cutler has a background in teaching English to speakers of other languages and popular education. She has worked as a facilitator and trainer for 7 years working with adults and young people on social and environmental justice issues and looking for ways to take action. Her main focus over the last few years has been refugee and migrant rights campaigning and solidarity work but she is also actively involved in housing cooperatives.

Eleanor Fairbraida has many years experience in permaculture design, community development, popular education, and environmental activism. Most recently, she has been working as a campaign co-ordinator for Police Spies Out of Lives, and as the development officer for South Gloucestershire Dementia Action Alliance. She is particularly interested in developing understandings of systems thinking.