Learning Landscapes
Transformative Learning across landscapes
Learning Landscapes is realife's networked approach to transformative learning, undertaken with communities, organisations and funders.
The approach has been developed and tested over the past 15 years by realife members across many contexts: community environmental activism in South Africa, water rights, conservation, land rights, gender, justice in funding, organisational development, and work with funders and philanthropies.
It brings people on the frontline of injustice together with the organisations and funders around them, breaks down silos, and connects learning into action.
Safeguarding and care are built into the work because it consistently surfaces harm, and stories run through it as participants recover what has been lost.
Rooted in real struggles
We start from the real experiences of injustice people live through, not from content delivered to them. Those closest to injustice understand it best.
Co-created and owned by participants
Participants define the focus, ask the questions, and lead the direction of the learning in ways that matter to their context, bringing in the expertise they need.
Learning as the material of change
Participants develop a Change Project: a grounded inquiry or action they lead in their own context, exploring what is happening, how it came to be, what it means, and how change might happen from where they actually are.
Held across time and terrain
Learning journeys unfold over months or years, online or in person, from rural communities to institutional settings, across multiple sectors and people who all take part as learners.
Building networks that last
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.
Challenging what disables justice
It strengthens connections across sectors, geographies and hierarchies, including funder and grantee. These become networks of care and knowledge that outlast the formal process.
Where this work is happening
With the Southern African Wildlife College, we are delivering Learning Landscapes with frontline justice workers across the Great Limpopo and Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Areas, beginning with regenerative herders and community engagement practitioners.
From 2023 to 2024 we delivered this work with WWF South Africa and a range of learning partners from 2023 until 2024, when it was curtailed in early 2025 as part of the global funding cuts.
Alongside the southern African work, we are developing a parallel strand in Europe on gender, migration and anti-racist practice, in the western European colonial nations whose past and continuing extraction shapes the conditions the southern African work navigates.
Learning Landscapes posts
