At Recrear we like to host human laboratories and feel-tanks to learn how to live, create, and change together. We translate our learnings to accompany the healing and transformation of organizations and movements in order to create new social realities.
We believe that transformative processes happen in individual, collective and system fractals – each equally important and necessary. We design and accompany activities aimed at bringing people together to reconnect and weave together new possibilities around the complex social realities we are embedded in.
During our programs, we identify common questions that can be explored at the individual, group and societal levels. We use participatory action research, creative and reflective practice, participatory design and co-creation. By establishing pop-up communities with people from diverse backgrounds and identities we can deconstruct and reimagine our (inner and outer) worlds.
We invite participants to welcome vulnerability, engage in collective care, imagine new realities, develop creative solutions and plan collective action.
If you’re wondering what it looks like to work with us, here are some of the approaches that guide our collaborations:
Reboot is a self-facilitated womxn’s space. For a week, we engage a small group of womxn (6-8) in a reflective practice deep dive designed to collectively unpack the questions underlying our inner and collective work at Recrear. We do this together with our community and people who resonate with those questions and are interested in accompanying us and being accompanied.
Our aim is to create an environment that can be nourishing to each other’s individual growth. These gatherings are designed to critically look at the question such as ‘How do we find our path in a changing system while continually discovering ourselves?’ and and to help generate creative and thoughtful practices that facilitate our growth as people and practitioners.
In the past few years we have been collecting our research methodologies in a digital library. This library provides free access to creative research methods and facilitation activities which have been designed by the Recrear team, our partners and participants in our programmes. In the library, we offer a step-by-step guide to each tool and method so that anyone can use them in their own programmes and research projects.
Semillero — the Spanish word for “seedbed” or “seed farm” — is a collective learning space where we come together as people and practitioners to deepen our understanding and practice of accompaniment.
In this online space, we gather a small group of 10-14 people where we share some of the tools we use in our work at Recrear, while also creating space for participants to offer their own wisdom, skills, and experience.
Magnify is our annual residency program – we understand it as a laboratory of experiences and emotions around a question that we co-create every year.
The program is made up of a number of different elements:
Each year we co-design the Magnify programme through a cooperative inquiry process which lasts six months and in which people from our network and past Magnify members come together to develop a question, dream our program, and play with new ideas.
Participatory action research (PAR) Course
Research is not only about publications. It is not something abstract, to be undertaken purely for academic purposes. It is the launchpad for inspired collective action, action that changes our day-to-day realities. The outcome of a PAR project can be a shift in ways of being in the world, the development of new skills and networks or liberating a creative impulse.Participatory Action Research is a way of experiencing research as a collective, creative, and transformative journey.
However PAR doesn’t only support research processes, it can belong anywhere there is a need for a participatory and transformative process. The design arc and key principles of PAR can be just as useful for team building, strategy development, participatory evaluation, memory building practices, network d
We organise creative online sessions and series open to anyone interested in accessing an intimate digital space, checking in with themselves and reflecting on how we relate to the world around us.
We are currently offering two series:
Going Inward – aimed at exploring through creative writing and painting.
Moving Inward – to dive deep with movement and physical theatre.
