Becoming The Ancestors We Needed: A Land Story at 42 Acres
- 16 minutes ago
- 7 min read
Regenerative work requires regenerative people. In 2025, Be The Earth created a £50k Subsidy Pot and opened the land at 42 Acres to ten groups from our community — farmers, activists, healers, and organisers — not as a reward, but as replenishment.
Here's one story from that year — of a community of changemakers who came together in ancient woodland to rest, dream, and remember what they were building toward.
What happens when we collectively dream?
By Benedicta Asamoah-Russell, Co-Founder, Golden Sankofa
When we rest together, when we dream together, when we listen deeply to one another, something shifts. Since Spring 2025, we’ve been creating a community of changemakers that would eventually come together in a retreat setting. The essence of the “Collective Dreamspace” is a time to simply be, to connect with nature, and to gather in community. We listened to what this community of changemakers wanted, and together we held each other in a way I will carry for a long time.
The Heart of Sankofa
When Golden Sankofa came together to dream up what resonates most for us as changemakers, we were creating something we believed could make a difference. Our practice is grounded in Sankofa to learn from the past to build for the future, to “go back and get it”.
Our Sankofa praxis is layered. It draws from Akan traditions of learning from the people, places, and stories before us to shape a better future. It means respecting our elders, acknowledging the past sometimes through pain, and learning to work with it toward collective healing. Yet Sankofa continues to evolve and you’ll hear many interpretations of how people around the world have made it their own, resonating across different worldviews and contexts.
As Ekow Eshun reflects in a podcast on Sankofa and Afrofuturism, time doesn’t move in one direction, and this fluid understanding helps us know who we are, where we are, and where we’re going.
Amara Spence’s recent blog on the intersection of futurism and archiving offers further wisdom: Sankofa as “worldbuilding towards liberatory transformation begins with memory, repair and continuity” when constructing alternative futures as Black communities.
This proverb resonates with so many, and the beauty of my land, my people, is our openness in supporting the wisdom others take from Sankofa around the world. Ghanaians move through life with humility and curiosity, always asking what we can offer the world and what the world has to offer, opening doors to whoever crosses. It’s no wonder Sankofa has inspired so many who feel able to adopt it in ways that resonate with their own journeys.
This is the exact ethos we’ve taken in integrating Sankofa into our work* with changemakers.
We’ve been making sense of what it means to build a better world, to be good ancestors, and to sit with joyful and painful histories beside one another.
Our aim for the retreat was to weave Sankofa into how we worldbuild, gently exploring the question: What are the teachings from within us and our ancestors (blood, land, spiritual) that will help us dream up a world that centers joy, peace, and connection?
Head, Heart, and Hands
We explored this through our hands, head, and heart. We explored the feminine wisdom within us from childhood and the teachings from land that ground and connect us as communities. These questions affected each changemaker differently; some felt deep pain when thinking about land, others when reflecting on childhood femininity.
What emerged powerfully was how joy and pain co-exist. What became clear was that exploring these topics in community helps us on a journey towards healing ourselves, creating space for better worlds.
We cannot heal the world without first healing ourselves.
This isn’t to say any of us is fully healed after three days together. Rather, there are healing qualities in being held by community while we sit with deep questions, nourished by one another. It’s rare to do this with people whose paths are different yet remarkably similar to our own. Here are some glimpses into our time together.
Head: Land Wisdom
We explored the places where each of us feels most connected, where we can learn and hold teachings from. The connection to land could manifest in whatever way felt most important to each person, not only through lineage or birth but also through spiritual bonds to land.
This exploration has been particularly meaningful for me. For a long time, as diaspora, I felt I didn’t belong to a land, but by connecting more deeply to the wisdom held in land and to the nature of place, I feel held. I can integrate these wisdoms into my life and share them with others.
It heals me and connects me to building a more caring world each day, and this is why I wanted to share this with the dreamers.
On a personal level, I’ve found belonging in noticing the more-than-human things that make up the land where I live; the birds, the trees, the pollinators drawn to what I grow.
The lands I feel connected to through lineage, Ghana, holds me through stories and proverbs of my indigenous land and through learning about plants; hibiscus, neem, moringa, the Ceiba tree.
This shows me I can experience knowing and belonging to land in different ways. I’ve also felt connection to lands I haven’t yet visited, through their cultures and rituals. Ethiopia, Somalia, Brazil (Bahia), places with slower, grounded ways of life connected to ceremony, ritual, and spirituality that bring communities together, are held so dearly by diaspora. These lands remind me how these elements of life can hold us all in our changemaking communities.
What felt most resonant among us as dreamers were the commonalities in rituals across the lands we hold dear, especially how these allow for transcendence.
We felt reassured that spiritual connection to land can be across multiple lands, which brings a sense of safety. There was also a strong longing for deeper connection to land, and questions arose about how we create the connection we’re seeking.
As we considered what this means for our futures and building a better world, we held questions:
How might we create our own rituals and symbols that help us feel closer to ancestry?
How can we let go of connection to land that no longer serves us?
How do we create our own versions of land that we feel proud of and belong to?
Heart: Feminine Wisdom
We often sat with our hands on our hearts; to meditate, to sing, simply to be together. It was heart-centered and emotionally driven. We had to center this in our Collective Dreamspace as an opposition to a world that values productivity and thought over presence and emotion.
We made space to reconnect with the feminine wisdom within us that helps us dream up a world centered on joy, peace, and connection. We held our inner children close and honored them. We let intuition guide us, holding the teachings of Clarissa Pinkola Estés: “To know her is an ongoing process, a lifelong process, and that is why the work is a lifelong work.”
To hold onto our Wild Woman/our Inner Child, we carried a song gifted by Foregather’s Emily: “You don’t have to know the way, the way knows the way.”
As we sang together, we felt each other’s heartbeat and our wider community. Through reconnecting with our inner feminine wisdom, we felt a collective sense of self-assurance and self-trust and held onto the fire burning bright within us.
We remembered that feminine energy lives within all of us, regardless of gender identity, and should be cultivated in everyone. We must remember the bursts of softness and care alongside the power and drive. We remembered that we get to choose what ancestors we become; a reminder of the privilege we hold when we can make this choice, and how it helps build that world filled with joy, peace, and connection.
This heart was centered throughout in how we sat in nature and how nature held us tightly.
We were held by ancient woodland that had sheltered many hearts before us; those hiding from persecution for being healers, herbalists, midwives… changemakers.
We felt the wood’s heart beating as we took long walks on rainy autumn mornings. Some of us got swept away, lost in the heart of the woods, because we felt that connection to nature. I feel a deep sense of gratitude to 42 Acres for stewarding the land and the woods that held us.
Hands: Embodied Practice
We painted for the sake of painting; telling stories through our art. We got our hands dirty preparing soil to plant seeds that captured the teachings we most want to nurture.
We felt a release when given permission to truly feel the earth between our fingernails.
We washed away what no longer served us, washing each other’s hands to close our time together. We scrubbed our bodies in the sauna, taking in smells and sounds, being truly present.
We immersed ourselves in water to release the grief we were holding.
The embodiment was meaningful and profound. We truly moved through our bodies and acknowledged every part and what it holds, cleansing each step of the way.
Home Coming
As we closed our time together, we carried deeper questions with us, a sense that this work needs to continue. We learned that going back to get it, Sankofa, isn’t about retrieving what was lost, but about remembering what has always been with us: the wisdom in our hands, the knowing in our hearts, the connection to ancestors that grounds us as we build forward.
This collective dreaming reminded us that we are not alone in our changemaking.
When we create space to rest, to feel, to be held by community and nature, we remember that the future we’re building begins with how we tend to ourselves and each other now. We are becoming the ancestors we needed, and that work, that purpose, continues in each breath, each ritual, each moment we choose presence over productivity.
We couldn’t have created the Collective Dreamspace and made it accessible without Be the Earth Foundation’s grant. Their support made it possible for changemakers to gather, rest, and dream together.
We will continue to manifest our dreams into reality by creating more spaces like this, with the love and support of our network, allies, and collaborators. We call on grantmakers and philanthropists to notice the importance of these spaces for nurturing and sustaining the civic sector, and to recognise that transformation requires not only action but also the time and space to heal, connect, and remember who we are.
The Collective Dreamspace showed us that the worlds we’re dreaming into being are already here, nestled in the spaces between us when we gather with intention, humility, and love.
*Footnote: “Work” is a strong word. I’m searching for an alternative to describe what we do with changemakers; it’s so grounded in purpose and belonging that it often doesn’t feel like work in the traditional sense. Purpose feels more fitting.
