Reintroducing Foregather
We've clarified our purpose and offerings. May all women remember.
We help women1 to cultivate creative energy through practices for remembering our connections with self, community and earth.
To make our creative contributions from a place of aliveness.
Between Britain and South Africa.
May all women remember
Read more about us here.
Foregather began in Cape Town, February 2024, born from our desire to gather with other women and support their creative expression (read more here).
We hosted our first gathering in September last year, in Hartland, on the North coast of Devon, England, with nine wonderful changemakers. The weekend was more impactful than we could ever have imagined:
“My partner, not a man for hyperbole, said to me yesterday: “Foregather was the most influential weekend of your life”.
— LizzieI came feeling a sense of urgency to develop one of my ideas but left with more confidence and a deep sense of self-belief. There was beauty, magic, joy, vulnerability, companionship and ease. It really has to be experienced to understand”
— Anita"I feel different. Energised. Let’s go! Connected with myself. Ready. I feel (and this sounds grand), like I’m tipping into a new era for myself."
— Participant“We really so quickly felt like a community, a Foregather family. We are a new tribe of women who are continuing to lift each other up.”
— Participant
Read more about the weekend here.
Over the past nine months, the Foregather Hartland WhatsApp group chat has been popping off, with excellent playlist shares, sauna meetups, deep mutual support and brewing creative collaborations.
And as for Team Foregather? Fortified by naps and salt and vinegar crisps, we have been listening to what Foregather might become and bringing it forth at a suitably slow and attuned pace.
Here’s what we currently know about Foregather’s purpose and future offerings.
Why Foregather exists
We have watched the collective context change rapidly over the past year: growing inequality, emboldened fascists, and escalating wars and genocides. Virulent misogyny, societal polarisation, and climate-crisis induced floods and fires. AI changing what it means to relate, work and create.
We feel ecological and societal collapse in our bodies. Tight, restricted ribcages, unsettled bellies, restlessness, the irresistible urge to scroll our phones and disengage.
Life seems increasingly complex, exhausting and undignified.
So many of us hunger for belonging and aliveness.
We imagine future worlds that hum with the gifts and genius of women, where profound healing flows between people and land, and all beings are enlivened by creativity, reciprocity and dignity.
Foregather’s role is to help women to cultivate creative energy through practices of remembering our connections with self, community and earth.
To make our creative contributions from a place of aliveness.
Between Britain and South Africa.
May all women remember.
We believe that creative expression is an antidote to the separation and scarcity of modernity, an essential ingredient in the healing of self and culture.
Women’s creative contributions are crucial in shaping the humming futures we dream of. In our communities, we notice an increasing desire among women for sisterhood, for “islands of coherence” where we gather to create, make meaning and re-enchant ourselves with the earth.
We need more dedicated spaces like these for women to dream into their creations, where we don’t have to squeeze ourselves into the extractive spaces offered by venture-capital style incubators and accelerators.
Dedicated spaces to gather are even more needed in South Africa, where colonisation and Apartheid leave legacies of extreme racial and socio-economic inequality and one of the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world. South Africa is a country that often operates in survival mode, lacking funding and initiatives that tend to creativity. Where are the safe, accessible spaces for women to drop into our bodies, connect deeply with others and the land, and begin to imagine alternative futures?
Cultivating creative energy through practices of remembering
One of the most impactful elements of Foregather Hartland was the tender sharing and adoption of practices for connecting with self, community and earth. We anointed each other with homemade plant oils, made herbal infusions, lit candles, cooked delicious food, sang together, and facilitated simple rituals.
Practices like these are pragmatic, resourcing and enlivening. Working through our senses rather than through the mind, they enable us to channel creative energy, the abundant force that animates all of life, kindling desire for change, exploration and creation.
Creative energy is what makes our contributions sing, whether we’re crafting newsletters, zines, books, films, courses, experiences or collectives.
When we connect with creative energy, we’re connecting to the same life-force that flows through all of creation. We naturally connect with what the collective needs, communing with a fuller, more ancient wisdom. We don’t need to strategise or search for our purpose. With ease, we find the sweet spot between our gifts and what the world is crying out for. We find roles to play in healing our cultures and places.
When did you forget you have a body? When were you first severed from your sacred intuition? When did you start to feel safer alone than in connection with others?
When did your culture forget how to honour the earth? When were the threads that link you to your ancestors cut?
When did you stop feeling alive?
What might you create if you remembered that you have a body? If you remembered rest, pleasure and attunement to yourself and the earth?
Did you know that the more-than-human world - land, plants, animals, all of life - longs to collaborate with you?
What if you rediscovered practices for connecting with a universe of support, and created from a place of feeling deeply loved and honoured?
For now, we share the practices that we have personally found to be nourishing and effective, and where we have good relationships with their lineages. We continue to learn about and respectfully adopt practices from the UK, South Africa and beyond.
Our offerings
How we’ll help women to cultivate creative energy and bring forth their creative contributions:
Biennial gatherings and festivals for changemakers in Britain and South Africa
An online learning experience for multiple cohorts of women, based on our evolving creative energy model, with brilliant guest teachers
Light-touch products to inspire and support women all around the world to gather and remember
Beautiful writing, film and creative work that reaches millions and creates a living archive of practices.
In our wildest dreams, we help many, many women to remember aliveness and create world-shifting contributions. In our wildest, wildest dreams, Foregather is reparative, flowing money and opportunity from Britain to South Africa (from Global North to Global South).
In the here and now, we are spending the next six months exploring paths to sustainability (please do get in touch if you have any advice to share!).
We would love support to
Craft a proper brand that connects with women across our dual lands and communicates the expansiveness of our vision
Host our next gatherings and build towards our first festival (we’re aiming for a second gathering in 2026, in either Devon, Scotland or South Africa)
With wise teachers and practitioners, research the questions that underpin the online learning experience and the writing, film and creative offers.
Over the next year we aim to prototype light-touch support for women to gather and remember, a true passion project. More on this to come.
Get in touch by email (hello@foregather.co) or leave us a comment and let us know what you think!
We do not use AI for Foregather’s creative work. All words, photography and creations are by Laura and Emily, channelling creative energy, supported by our practices.
May all women remember
Gʷedyo kʷākʷo wrakkā ati-biw2
Mag alle vroue onthou3
Yanga wonke amanina akhumbule4
We focus on women’s experiences and how they relate to creativity, including occasional references to female physicality. We welcome all women, non-binary and gender expansive people for whom this resonates. Please get in touch if you have any questions or concerns about inclusion.
Proto-Celtic
Afrikaans
isiXhosa
So excited to see and feel this perfect evolution of the most special thing I have ever been a part of. May all women remember, indeed. Huge love. X