Company activities and impact Building on our first four years working directly within the neighbourhood, during which we established spaces for imagination, practical climate action, and early prototypes for neighbourhoodscale transition, our work in 2024 focused on consolidating these foundations into a more structured and intentional phase. This included reorienting our participatory programmes so that the relationships, learning, and capabilities developed in earlier cycles are now positioned to play a direct role in the co-development of the Neighbourhood Public Square site. Throughout the year, we deepened and built new relationships with the growing design team for the Neighbourhood Public Square, including collaborators such as Material Cultures and others supporting the architectural, material, ecological, and governance dimensions of the project. In 2024 we began to bring the Neighbourhood Public Square proposal, which synthesises the first four years of learning, back into our neighbourhood-level work, using it as a foundation for prototyping everyday entry points for neighbours to engage. By doing this, we aimed to embed long-term vision and civic scale thinking into the daily rhythms and activities of the neighbourhood. We continued to deliver Neighbourhood Trade School, our neighbourhood-scale school for transition, designed to democratise access to the skills needed to design, own, and govern climate transition, retrofit homes, streets, and civic spaces. The programme provided structured opportunities for neighbours to connect, learn, test tools, and apply skills in their own local contexts. Through Skills for Transition, we worked with partner organisations specialising in growing techniques, renewable energy, and building/construction skills. We organised learning visits to exemplar sites such as Centre for Alternative Technology, WeCanMake, and Retrofit Balsall Heath, enabling participants to observe real-world precedents for community-led retrofit and construction, and to bring those lessons back into our neighbourhood. In 2024, we initiated Material Matters, a four-month structured learning journey for neighbours interested in co-designing and co-building civic spaces or in engaging with retrofit at the street and neighbourhood scale. This programme supported participants to rethink the role of materials in shaping resilient, socially just, ecologically safe neighbourhoods, while also gaining practical skills relevant to regenerative construction. Material Matters aligned closely with our work with Material Cultures and other design collaborators, helping to build local capacity and shared understanding for informed participation in the future development of the Neighbourhood Public Square. We also partnered with Fircroft College to deliver a learning programme for small and medium-sized construction and built-environment organisations exploring pathways toward regenerative and climatealigned building practices. Delivered through Innovation UK’s Innovation Hubs Project, this work aimed to increase awareness, capability, and adoption of sustainable and digital construction techniques across the regional SME ecosystem. We continued our front-facing neighbourhood activity throughout the year, including regular supper clubs and the annual B16 Lunch in September, bringing together neighbours, partners, and practitioners through talks, workshops, and shared activities. Alongside these events, we maintained an open posture by open-sourcing tools and frameworks, sharing learning in real time, and delivering public talks, convenings, and knowledge exchanges to ensure transparency and broader sector benefit. Although much of our work remains rooted in direct neighbourhood engagement, 2024 was also a year of significant development work behind the scenes: progressing the Neighbourhood Public Square site; advancing design, material, governance, and operational frameworks for its long-term stewardship; and ensuring that our participatory programmes and relationships feed directly into this civic asset. As such, 2024 represents a deliberate transition year, aligning community learning, partnership development, everyday-level prototyping and design work with the practical requirements of advancing the Neighbourhood Public Square towards implementation and long-term neighbourhood benefit.

As in previous years, it has always been crucial to ensure we start universally and not make individual judgements on need, people's circumstances based on addresses, appearances, ask them to provide evidence, or binary rules that created layers and layers of inaccessibility at a space that was designed to connect beyond such divisions. The early cultures we adopt, the invitations and experiences shape the future direction and thus, it's essential we shape the platform openly, creatively and universally, as we mean to go on. Invitations were regularly posted by hand across all parts of the wider neighbourhood directly by our team, through deep one-to-one conversations, and particularly through neighbourhood networks we had already built through the previous years, who identified the distinct lack of spaces for a number of communities they were connected to and part of, as well as online through Facebook and Whatsapp communication.

No remuneration was received

No transfer of assets other than for full consideration