Banner image of a the transforming the fenceline course graduation ceremony - dozens of smiling people sit facing the front in a shade netted wooden building.

Learning Landscapes

Transformative Learning across landscapes

Learning Landscapes is a networked approach for regenerative change undertaken with funders, organisations and communities.

The approach has been developed and tested across contexts including water rights, conservation, justice in funding, gender, land rights and activism. This approach was developed, over the past 15 years, by different realife members in various contexts from community based environmental activism in South Africa, organisational development and work with funders and philanthropies.

Since 2022 we have partnered in solidarity to both enable entities transform as well as accompany them to strengthen their transformative ways of working with others.

This approach breaks down silos and connects learning into action.

Rooted in real struggles

Co-created and owned by participants

Rather than delivering content, we support processes that are shaped by those involved.

Co-created and owned by participants

Participants define the focus, ask the questions and lead the direction of learning in ways that matter to their context - bringing in the expertise they require.

Learning as the material of change

Participants develop a Change Project - a grounded inquiry or action they lead in their own context. These projects explore what is happening, how it came to be, what it means for us, how change might happen, and what we’re learning along the way.

Held across time and terrain

Learning journeys can unfold over months or years, online or in-person, across diverse spaces, from rural communities to institutional settings. This can involve multiple sectors, institutions and people, all of whom participate in the process as learners.

Building networks that last

It strengthens connections across sectors, geographies, traditional hierarchies (e.g. funder-grantee) and movements. These relationships become networks of care and knowledge that outlast the formal process, enabling longer-term transformation.

Challenging what disables justice

Together we create space to name and confront the systems that hold injustice in place - while imagining, understanding and building alternatives rooted in care, equity and regeneration.

Learning Landscapes posts

How can Learning Landscapes reshape movements and systems?

What is the Learning Landscapes approach? “This wasn’t learning for its own sake - it was survival work, care work, movement work. It was learning to stay in dignity and action, rooted in the urgencies that shape our daily lives” – Jane Burt, founding member of realife Learning At its heart, the Learning Landscapes approach recognises that learning should begin with the real experiences of injustice that people live through every day. It acknowledges that all knowledge system

New long-term transformative learning partnership with Southern African Wildlife College

We’re excited to announce our new partnership with the Southern African Wildlife College (SAWC), a long-standing centre of learning rooted in some of the most complex conservation landscapes in the region. For nearly three decades, SAWC has supported rangers, conservation practitioners and natural resource managers to navigate the realities of protecting land, wildlife and livelihoods under immense pressure, from human–wildlife conflict to extractive practices and rapidly shi