Our Impact

An invitation into a joint endeavour

The impact and evaluation of our work is a primary focus for The Visionaries and is always considered a joint endeavour. We know that change is best supported when it is co-owned by those that partner and participate with us, and those that have a stake in how this participation unfolds. 

Working together to understand what happens when partners and participants embark on working with us results in genuine co-authorship of the process and the published results. Working in this way strengthens the agency, ownership and openness participants feel, tackling and reversing concerns regarding power and colonisation amongst other issues often associated with research.

The Visionaries see this collaboration with partners and participants as an integral building block in everything we do, leading to richer and stronger outcomes for all involved.

Transforming relationships

An evaluation of our Growing Healthy Schools project indicates that even the smallest interventions can promote a significant uplift in healthy relationships between staff and within school settings. It is these transformed ways of relating, to ourselves, to each other and with the wilder world that we place at the heart of our intentions and our approach in regards to research and appreciating the experiences reported by participants.

When searching to understand more about how our programmes impact on school staff and pupils we seek to involve all participants as fully as possible in the activation and conduct of our search for meaning.

We see this as our responsibility: to enable, amplify and privilege the voices of those participating alongside us.

What we know about our current impact

On return from involvement in our recent Growing Healthy Schools ‘catalyst camp’ school staff reported the following impacts and transformative effects on relationships:

  • “An experience that I will never forget, one that has been thought provoking and challenging, so it will challenge us all to be better, to do better.” (Head of Department)
  • “I’ve grown, I’ve become vulnerable, I’ve loved, I’ve cried. I’ve learnt that there is self-care in nature.” (Intervention Officer)
  • “I think I have, not just learnt a lot about myself, but a lot about others as well. I have become a lot more considerate about other peoples feelings… “ (Teacher)
  • “I built bonds with people whom I thought I could never get along with. I saw different sides of people, the vulnerabilities of people, and I’m sure that people saw my vulnerabilities as well.” (Teacher)

As a result of this testimony of growth and personal transformation, the entire school community that hosts these staff members has committed to embark on a process of culture change, exploring and aiming for healthier relationships that are fairer, and wilder.

Read the full report

Our Research Partners

Rewilding Our Research

We currently partner with ‘Rewilding Education’, to evaluate how our programmes impact on teachers, pupils and school communities. 

‘Rewilding’, a concept usually applied to the process of restoring ecosystems to a healthier balance, has increasingly been used in other contexts – rewilding places, and rewilding people. Rewilding Education CIC, is the first organisation to officially link ‘rewilding’ with education, educators, and educational systems. 

Created and led by two experienced educators with over 20 years experience working in educational settings their strong track records as researchers and academics enables Rewilding Education to ignite radical educational change, making education healthier, fairer and wilder, for the benefit of people and planet.

Combining the principles and procedures of (decolonized) ethnographic fieldwork with the strongest commitment to social pedagogy (the processes of: caring, walking alongside and bringing learning to life) Rewilding Education CIC is a leader in the field and of research approaches for this emergent area of educational practice. 

See www.rewildingeducation.org for more details and for a fuller account of their approach to evaluation and impact reporting.

The evidence and legacy we lean on


The Visionaries are guided through our partnership with Dr David Blumenkrantz and his lifetime of experience with youth and community development through rites of passage.

Rites of passage have evolved over millennia as our species’ natural way to navigate life-altering challenges, transitions and ordeals that we all inevitably encounter – birth, becoming ‘adult’, death…. even pandemics. Rites of passage help to nurture healthy relationships that support both the individual and the collective to embrace transformations as opportunities for growth, for dreaming, for renewal. We draw on this ancient wisdom and look to nature as an example for how to live and learn in balance and harmony. 

Dr. Blumenkrantz’s way of working with rites of passage has a validating evidence base of over 25 years of direct experience (see Blumenkrantz, 1992, 1996; Blumenkrantz & Wasserman, 1998).

Universal across all cultures, rites of passage occurs across 3 distinct phases, commonly called – Preparation, Transition, Incorporation. We use these three phases as a framework through which to co-design with schools, adapted to fit a micro and macro level depending on their capacity and ambitions. With each iteration of this process our visions become more of a reality.