Our first project is a book series - Common Treasures - that brings together practical responses to contemporary challenges in rural communities. The collected essays come from practitioners who are working on the ground - often literally in the field - in communities and rural places across the UK. Many of the contributors are directly engaged in the practical work of systems change, whether at the scale of a single small holding or at the scale of a regional planning policy or food system.

Rejecting the city-centric discourse that often surrounds issues related to emerging and pressing contemporary issues, including climate adaptation and mitigation, inequality and access to good-quality housing and food the book instead collects input from an extraordinary collection of people working on these questions in rural contexts. All of the practitioners in these books share an understanding of the centrality of land use and access to land in solving the most challenging problems we face.

Contributions feature representatives of the Ecological Land Cooperative, Evolving Forests, Falmouth Food Coop, Tinkers' Bubble, Straw Works, Wessex Community Assets, ReSet, Material Cultures, Local Works, Fordhall Community Land Initiative, Roots to Regeneration and Transition Towns. Together, they give a snapshot of the incredibly wide and diverse network of imaginative, tenacious groups and individuals dedicated to building viable futures by working on and in the UK countryside.