Welcome to Foregather
Gatherings and practices that connect women more deeply to creative energy.
Through remembering our connection to self, community and the earth.
Foregather is the creation of three hopeful women: Laura Malan, Emily Bazalgette and Fran Cook. Currently, Foregather exists as in-person gatherings in the UK and this Substack newsletter exploring creative energy. And, in the future, perhaps much more. We have plans.
We’d love to host gatherings in South Africa (Laura’s home) too. We wish to explore how we can create spaces for dreaming and creativity that bridge Global South and Global North, and what a regenerative, reparative resourcing model could look like.
Read our first post to find out more about Foregather’s origins, our beliefs about creative energy and why supporting women’s creativity1 matters to us. Read our review of our first gathering in Hartland, Devon, UK, in September 2024 (review coming soon).
Subscribe to hear about our future gatherings and offers, and to receive our working-out-loud thoughts about creative energy.
If you have any questions or feedback, get in touch at hello@foregather.co.
Foregather is for women who…
Know, bone-deep, that they have something to express. They might be unsure what that something is, or if they are sure, how to get started
Are experiencing a tug towards creating something in service of a more communal, regenerative, equitable, beautiful future. A hopeful future
Are on the cusp of change, called to something bigger than themselves. Their future self whispers to them, if only they could listen and trust deeply enough
Long for community, earth-connection and purpose. A longing so vast it sometimes feels like grief
Wonder how this potential path will pay the bills. They wonder how they will reconcile such a path with their current work or practice.
They fear what others will say. They ask themselves, who am I to dream?
Who am I to imagine? Who am I to create?Are ready to trust that the right things will emerge given the right conditions
Who are ready to create, with the right support around them.
What we know
From our own experiences, we know that creative self-expression comes from fostering creative energy. From embracing creativity as a way of being, deciding to live in gratitude, a commitment to enchantment, an enduring relationship with pleasure and beauty. It’s the meals you cook for sheer sensory enjoyment, the outfits you wear that conjure your most joyful, confident self, and the rocks and shells that jangle in your pockets as you leave the beach. Creative energy pours through the romance of a thousand moments.
We know that women’s creativity is collaborative and non-linear, ebbing and flowing in cycles. We know that our most rooted, aligned expressions of creativity come from regular practices that connect us with ourselves, community and earth.
We know that creativity is healing and innate to all of us
We know creative energy is fostered in our relationships with ourselves, each other and the earth. It’s borne of practices that encourage attunement, flow, rest, play, joy, magic, beauty and enchantment
We know that communion with other beings (animals, plants, fungi, water, minerals) enhances our connectedness to ourselves and to each other
We know that beauty, sensuality, joy and play are everyday pleasures, our birthrights, not “rewards” for productivity or achievement
We know that designing the right conditions and trusting in emergence results in deeper, more authentic work than linear processes or rigid workshop schedules
We know that we don’t have enough opportunities to rehearse living communally, and that intentional gatherings are important “temporary villages”, spaces where we can strengthen our atrophied muscles of collectivism
We know that people, and women especially, need space to dream into new initiatives and stories
The three of us have all struggled with integrating multi-faceted professional and personal identities. We know that holding plural identities and practices is enriching and necessary to create societies where all of our gifts are welcomed and recognised
We know that for ideas to find their truest expression, they need both dreaming spaces and practical creative support.
About us
Laura, Emily and Fran are longtime friends and collaborators who believe that creativity is an essential medicine to channel towards building hopeful futures. As a group, we host beautiful spaces of collective care where creative energy is nurtured.
We are guides, not gurus, bringing both our lived experience of nurturing our creative energies and our practical gifts:
Laura, the gifts of creative strategy and subtle plant and energy medicine
Emily, the gifts of regenerative facilitation and coaching
Fran, the gifts of hosting and brand design.
Laura is a creative strategist, designer, community herbalist and energy healing practitioner, living between the UK and South Africa. With decades of experience in design, Laura now also supports others to realise their creative dreams through coaching and curating inspirational spaces and experiences. Informed by her upbringing in South Africa and its beautiful, complex land, Laura brings her deep love for the natural world, her artistry and her hosting abilities to create intentional gatherings that enable us to practise joyful, easeful, communal living.
Emily is a facilitator, coach, grief tender and regenerative organisational designer, born and raised in London, now living in Devon, UK. Emily loves to help people reconnect with their intuition, work and create with ease and take brave steps towards their purpose. As a facilitator, she helps groups cohere through practices drawn from behaviour change, systems change, trauma-informed facilitation and seasonality. Emily is also a chronic illness advocate, writer and the creator of
, a soul-led project exploring and bearing witness to chronic illness grief. Laura and Fran were instrumental in bringing GriefSick to life.Fran is the Director of Francesca Cook Studio, a brand and digital design studio for positive change that operates as a collective, driven by the belief that things can be better for people and the planet. Fran takes a lean approach to branding, creating scalable design systems and just enough assets for brands to communicate effectively and develop sustainably. Fran grew up in Yorkshire, UK, and currently lives in London (but is eyeing her escape). An aspiring B&B host who would like a less laptop-based life, Fran brings to gatherings a warm welcome, heartfelt cooking and inclusive, seasonal menu design.
We are grateful to
The friends and teachers who inspire us:
adrienne maree brown, Alana Hyde Bloom, Amahra Spence, Asia Suler, Audre Lorde, Becoming Crew,
, Eliot Cowan, Francis Weller, Healing Justice London, Louise Armstrong, MAIA, Moral Imaginations, Phoebe Tickell, , , , Sister, Sophy Banks, , Tayo Medupin, White Awake and others.Our influences:
Our foremothers who guide us. The knowledge and practices of Indigenous people around the world, who are the guardians of ways of being that the West is only now remembering. Ways of being that are more collective, more connected to land, elements, plants, animals and the ancestral and spirit worlds.
The lands we’ll gather on:
England, Scotland and South Africa.
Conversations at our gatherings will focus on women’s experiences and how they relate to creativity, including references to female physicality. Whether you identify as a woman or as non-binary, we welcome you if this focus resonates with you and you’d feel comfortable participating. Please get in touch if you have any questions or concerns about inclusion. And, of course, we hope people of all genders will sign up to this newsletter!
