What we do
realife is a transformative learning collective, which means we work with people and organisations to collaboratively learn their way toward justice. Our work is rooted in liberation pedagogy and different justice-oriented frameworks
Through Learning Landscapes we bring people on the frontline of injustice together with the organisations and funders around them to build change.
Through our evaluation practice, we accompany organisations in reflecting on and understanding what is changing in and through their work, for whom, and what it would take to make change happen.
We treat care and safeguarding as work in their own right, because justice work is unsafe when harm goes unaddressed.
We value, support and work with storytelling, as a way to hold knowledge and history.
And we build long-term partnerships rather than short contracts, which is how this way of working spreads.
Through all of our work we look for ways of sharing openly what we learn and publish our resources, approaches and frameworks with creative commons licensing.
Learning Landscapes is realife's networked approach to transformative learning. It brings together people whose work and lives sit at the frontline of injustice, on fencelines, in the path of extraction, on the wrong side of who gets to belong, along with the organisations and institutions that work with or affect them, and the funders and policy structures around all of this.
Participants build shared analyses of what oppresses them, surface knowledge and stories that have been buried, and develop their own change projects: practical work on the policies, relationships, contracts and conditions they want to shift, from where they actually are.
Those closest to injustice understand it best, but breaking down what oppresses and finding the opportunity within it is collective work. realife, and our partners, are in it alongside them in solidarity.
We conduct evaluations for accountability and as transformative practice. These are collaborative accompaniment (which at times can encompass what is known as “monitoring”) in which we ask, through a collective learning process, what changed, how, for whom, and how it can be built on. The accountability that matters is to those with a stake in the outcomes, and realife works as an ally in making that work succeed for the people it is meant to serve rather than as a judge of whether it has.
Justice work happens in sectors where gender-based violence, sexual harassment, racism and patriarchal power run through organisations, communities and the partnerships between them, and where the structures meant to respond are often the same ones that protect those causing harm. realife works with organisations and funders to move safeguarding from policy on paper into practice that the people most exposed to harm shape, can use, and trust, building the conditions under which transformation is possible rather than performed.
The living archive of stories held in communities, oral traditions, memory, relationship and the land is older and deeper than anything built on top of it, and it is under sustained pressure from extraction, displacement and the commodification of voice. realife listens for stories, looks for fragments that have been lost, supports those who carry stories between communities, and resists their further extraction. realife is developing ways to resource storytelling embedded directly in communities, valued on its own terms rather than as a by-product of other work. In this, with others, we tell our own stories which contribute towards breaking down the extractive and regenerating with justice.
The deliberate move from consultancy and short-term contracting into long-term partnerships, recognising the labour and value flowing in every direction, refusing the branded organisational identity and the competition for funding that constrain so much of the sector, and treating the partnership relationship itself as a site of transformative learning where both parties change through how they choose to work together. This is also how the impact of our work scales, through the spread of ways of working across the networks that carry them forward.