Hello. We’re in the process of updating the gentle/radical website. In the meantime, a bit about where the company’s at in 2026…

In the last two years, gentle/radical moved from being a team running year-round projects and programmes, to stepping back as a funded organisation. The transition involved a process of enquiry, reflection, and an honest questioning of what we had grown into. It became clear that funded mechanisms can so often obstruct the very community building they claim to support – and that work like ours was possibly part of that problem. So we chose to hospice much of what the organisation has been, whilst continuing to ask how we build localised projects of community care that aren’t contingent on funding regimes.

“The Revolution Will Not Be Funded,” a conference that took place in 2004 organised by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence in Santa Barbara, California, led to the publishing of an anthology under the same name. The idea that the revolution cannot or should not be funded, is not new. But it’s one explanation of why gentle/radical took the decision to step away from funded models to support processes of community renewal. It’s a phrase that keeps returning – as a provocation, and as a kind of permission.

The need to restore localised cultures of reciprocity and communality is arguably the most urgent project we can build in these times. Yet these processes can be at odds with the frameworks of a funded enterprise. Where funding mechanisms tend to be top-down, bureaucratic, transactional, community building is necessarily ground-up, organic, and relational. With funded processes and projects, comes the pressure to evidence targets and outcomes, often in timescales that don’t suit the work or the people. We end up instrumentalising communities, and undermining the slow, emergent nature of relationship building.

And whilst our sectors are inundated with resources and expertise on how to build community differently, with platforms, podcasts, tool kits, reports, methodologies, and academic discourse at our disposal, Prentis Hemphill reminds us:

“There’s enough information. We all have enough information about what’s happening, how it’s happening… But I think in this moment what’s actually needed is for us to be changed by the information. To be changed in our behaviours, to be changed inside, to be changed in our relationships, to be changed in what we’re willing to do.”

And so…gentle/radical’s work looks different now. Projects are fewer and currently rely on little finance. What remains are the relationships built with neighbours over years of outreaching, door-knocking, friendship-building. This has given rise to a handful of local activities – a neighbourhood allotment project, local listening circles, the occasional community film screening or halal dance night – all moving at the pace of local need, inclination, capacity…

This website is being updated this year to host an archive of the company’s work. If you’re here to find out about gentle/radical’s activities in Riverside, do get in touch at hello@gentleradical.org.

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