Our purpose is to resource those experiencing environmental injustice to shape ecological knowledge and places, through artistic research and community action.
People from global majority backgrounds and lower-income communities are disproportionately affected by climate change and are often excluded from decisions and institutions that shape the living world around them — inequities rooted in a long history of colonialism, extractivism, and discrimination.
We aim to support those with lived experience of environmental injustice to imagine and realise change: through care-based ecological research practices, and locally rooted community-led nature projects.
We value collaboration, dialogue and joy, and work in the spirit of mutuality with our grantees, communities, animals, plants and fungi, listening to and learning from them.
OurPurpose
The way we work is as important as everything that we do.
Bold
We embrace risk and challenge orthodoxy. We take clear positions and back the individuals and ideas we believe in. We support communities to be bold too, and treat every outcome as learning.
Caring
We understand care as a practices of attention, of relationships, and of responsibility. We aim to extend that care to our grantees and beyond - to non-human life, to land, and to the health of communities and ecosystems.
Imaginative
We take and support creative action. We are led by curiosity, make space for uncertainty and allow for the unexpected.
Just
Justice shapes how we work. We understand justice as both structural and ecological. We aim to hold ourselves accountable to individuals and communities who have been systematically excluded from funding and decision-making.
OurValues
Liz Orton
Liz is co-founder and a trustee of Afield. She is a visual artist with a background in education and participatory arts. She worked as a Lecturer in Photography at London College of Communication, and as an Associate Artist with Performing Medicine, and has led participatory photography projects for PhotoVoice, the Photographers' Gallery, The Refugee Council and other community organisations.
Her artistic practice centres on archives and found images, considering the tensions in the production of knowledge and its circulation. Her practice has been supported by several grants including from the Mead Fellowship, Wellcome Trust and UCL Grand Challenges.
Mike Saunders
Mike is co-founder of Afield. He is an entrepreneur, technologist and trustee, interested in the way that communities are impacted by, and respond to environmental crises.
He founded community platform Commonplace, helping councils and developers to engage and co-design with over 12M local people. Commonplace data consistently shows nature and green space to be amongst the top two priorities for urban communities.
Mike is also deputy chair of Trinity College London and a trustee of Open City, which amongst other things runs the Open House Festival. He previously led digital at Kew Gardens, was a member of the Speaker's Advisory Committee on Public Engagement at Parliament, ActionAid's digital board and worked in government and broadcasting. He has a design MA, and trained as a software engineer.
Joana Esgalhado
Joana is Grants and Cohort Manager at Afield. She is a programme manager with an environmental justice background. She has designed and delivered placemaking and education projects that create positive social and environmental impact, both in the UK and Portugal. She is also a community gardener and nature educator.
Henrietta Simson
Henrietta is a trustee of Afield. She is an artist whose works reappraise the visual and spatial structures that inform dominant notions of landscape.
Keen to move beyond landscape’s identity as ‘de facto’ representational form, she explores radical, defamiliarised modes of looking that push at the boundaries between image and object, between illusion and embodied presence. Her research begins by re-visiting early western visual forms to locate different possibilities for 21st century ideas of landscape, which allow the complex hidden ecological/economic systems excluded from normative, aesthetic definitions to be revealed.
She holds a PhD from the Slade, UCL and teaches at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL, London. She is passionate about education, research and opportunities for all.
Peter Lewis
Peter is a trustee of Afield. He is the Chief Executive of Epping Forest Heritage Trust, and a Director of Mike’s Table CIC.
He is passionate about environmental and social justice, and has previously been Chief Executive of the London Cycling Campaign, London Voluntary Service Council and the Chartered Institute of Fundraising. He also worked for Crisis, the charity of homeless people, and held a senior role for the Mayor of London. He started his career as a solicitor for Allen & Overy.
He is the former Chair of Streetdoctors, and was a Board member of the London Marathon and London Youth Games.
Peter loves walking in wild landscapes, climbing, enjoying London’s wide cultural offer and chatting politics.