Iris + Birch
We work with communities, organisations and networks to imagine and build more equitable, regenerative and just futures.
We explore big questions and grey areas, seeking patterns that support new possibilities and ways of working to emerge.
We develop processes that help people to sit with and navigate complexity, recognising that the big challenges we face have no easy solutions.
We build safe, creative spaces to come together, working across fields and scales.
Iris + Birch is a collective of thinkers, designers, producers and facilitators, who are skilled at fostering the conditions for amazing collective action. We help people to develop the spaces, skills and practices to build change.
What we do
Iris + Birch is a multi-disciplinary collective working with partners and clients on short term and durational projects. Even when tackling the most challenging and complex systemic issues, we seek to nurture and encourage moments of joy and hope. We work with a number of different platforms, in person and online. We create spaces that foster deep human interactions, subvert traditional power structures and amplify voices that are not always heard.
We are particularly interested in combining approaches to curate and produce meaningful ways of gathering, learning and building possibilities.
Talk to us about:
- Deep facilitation
- Research and analysis
- Learning and field-building
- Creative exploration of issues and deep design of alternatives
- Strategy and transformative change
- Systems change
- Futuring and foresight
- Power
- Innovation for impact
We work across a broad number of domains, but particularly love to work in the contexts of:
- Civil society and community
- Creative industries
- Democracy
- Economic systems
- Environment
- Care and relationships
- Food systems
- Philanthropy and funding
Our work
At Iris + Birch we aim to engage directly with complex questions. We work with organisations, networks and communities to create and hold space to investigate, analyse and act within abstract and unpredictable systems. We embrace uncertainty and nuance, designing and implementing programmes that support people to engage with the unknown.
We thrive in relationship-based work, and are equally comfortable in virtual and physical settings.
We believe in collective imagination, power and action as an antidote to the intense turbulence and disruption we’re facing in the 21st Century. The inter-related individual, organisational and systemic challenges we’re facing create the need for positive, systemic change.
We can help.
Selected programmes
We are working with ClimateWorks Foundation to support their strategic and systemic change work, particularly exploring how and what alternative economic models might be able to support solutions to climate change.
Throughout 2023, we worked with Partners for a New Economy to co-design, produce and facilitate a number of field building events bringing together diverse stakeholders from across the alternative economics spectrum.
Joseph Rowntree Foundation brought us in to work with the newly created Emerging Futures team. We increased team capacity, and designed and facilitated a programme of events to inform the launch of their Emerging Futures Fund. In 2024 we will be supporting JRF to produce a series of related events, including the third instalment of Imagination Infrastructuring.
About
We are a collective of practitioners focused on exploring complexity and emergence. We design, develop and produce learning and research programmes. Collectively we bring decades of experience working with a variety of organisations, communities and networks to imagine and build more equitable, regenerative and just futures.
Meet the team
Carrie Deacon
Carrie is experienced strategist, researcher and designer with over 15 years’ track record of leading the development of strategy, innovation programmes and stewarding systemic responses to address big social challenges. Over the last 3 years Carrie has been an consultant working with a variety of funders, governments and frontline social purpose organisations to develop their strategies, examine future scenarios and opportunities, design new approaches to enable greater impact, and develop new ways of working with people and across systems.
Carrie has worked to design large scale engagement approaches, as well as deep research on complex issues, all with a view to taking practical action to navigate change. Prior to this Carrie was a Director of Government and Community Innovation at UK Innovation Foundation Nesta, worked with hundreds of organisations as a senior consultant at NCVO, and worked for a short period in the UK Central Government, but her passion lies in the power of people and communities.
Elle Davis
Elle is a writer and researcher with a focus on complex systems, sustainability and civil society. She has a background working on comms in the not-for-profit and campaign sphere including work with the Women’s Budget Group and Climate Parliament.
Elle has a Master’s degree in Media Practice for Development and Social Change in which she worked across a number of mediums to explore how storytelling plays a role in transition and systems change.
You can find more of her work at www.elledavis.co.uk
Mona Ebdrup
Mona is a trained Kaospilot with 10+ years of experience within project management and process facilitation. She is working visually in her facilitation and project leadership, supporting groups to see their work more systemically. She is trained and experienced within systems and generative scribing, having worked with clients from many corners of the world.
She is doing work within new economics (with a focus on the concept of Doughnut Economics) and with a regenerative farming association in Denmark, that is collectively buying up farmland in community by each member paying 20 EUR/monthly. The collective efforts by more than 3000 people have enabled the association to buy three farms that are now stewarded by regenerative practices.
Recently she has brought the problematic use of BMI in insurance companies in Denmark to the highest political levels, which has led to systemic changes across the entire insurance industry.
Suzy Glass
Suzy is a is a producer, designer and facilitator. She specialises in sustainability and designing the transformations required to achieve an orderly green transition. She has a background in digital innovation and transformation.
Suzy is interested in designing ways of build collective knowledge and intelligence. She creates and implements learning and engagement processes that support us to think beyond our individual boundaries. Her work helps people to frame and broach complex problems that contribute to shifting paradigms.
As well as being part of the Iris + Birch collective, Suzy is co-CEO of BRAE, a boutique strategy consultancy focussing on climate and nature.
Rachel Karasik
Rachel is a producer, project manager and writer with an MA in Anthropology of Food and an interdisciplinary background across food, tech, art, social innovation and civil society. She has worked across sectors, often in collaboration with those outside her field to create meaningful opportunities to learn from different perspectives and experiences.
Rachel is an intuitive connector and communicator passionate about making complex ideas clear and simple. She is interested in how we facilitate challenging and complicated conversations about our futures.
Outside of Iris + Birch, she is a ceramicist, making both practical and impractical ceramics and exhibits regularly.
Get in touch
We like to work with communities and clients to help explore big questions and grey areas, seeking patterns and themes that point towards the possible.
