FAMOUS FOR FIVE MILES
A place-based action learning journey exploring belonging, purpose, identity, community and relationship with the living world.
What would it mean to become deeply known by the place around you?
To know the trees, paths, people, weather, water, creatures and stories within five miles of where you live — and to let them know you back?
Famous for Five Miles is a new Becoming Crew learning experience beginning in the Bath, Bristol and Avon bioregion.
It invites young people into honest conversation, creative practice, time on the land and deeper relationship with community.
What is Famous for Five Miles?
Famous for Five Miles is an action learning experience about reconnecting with the places closest to us.
Rather than chasing recognition everywhere, we are asking what it means to become rooted somewhere. To build relationship with the land beneath our feet, the people around us, the more-than-human world, and the questions we are carrying about who we are and what we are here to do.
The journey blends honest conversation, nature connection, creative inquiry, council practice, peer support, rites of passage, and experiences with people who have deep knowledge of their craft.
It is about remembering that a hopeful future is not only imagined globally. It is practiced locally — in the places we walk, tend, listen to, and belong to.
Why five miles?
Five miles is close enough to walk.
Close enough to notice the same tree in different weather.
Close enough to recognise faces.
Close enough to know where the water flows, where the birds gather, where the soil is tired, where something is trying to grow back.
In a time of disconnection, speed and uncertainty, we are exploring what happens when young people are supported to build intimate relationship with the world immediately around them.
What would it mean to be known by your place?
What would it mean to become useful to it?
What might become possible if we learned to belong again?
Who is it for?
The first phase of Famous for Five Miles is focused on young men aged 18–25 in and around Bath, Bristol and the Avon bioregion.
We are beginning here because we are hearing a need for spaces where young men can speak honestly, build trust, explore identity and purpose, spend time in nature, and be supported by peers, elders and community.
At the same time, this work is not limited in spirit to one gender. The deeper invitation is for people of all identities: to reconnect with place, community, creativity and responsibility.
As the project grows, we intend to develop future journeys that are open to wider groups.You do not need to have the answers.
You do not need to have everything figured out.
You just need curiosity about where you are, who you are becoming, and what might be yours to do.
How does it work?
Phase One: Journey to the Circle
We are currently in a period of outreach, conversation and gathering.
This phase is about meeting young people, organisations, mentors, funders and community spaces across the bioregion. We are listening for what is needed, what language lands, what support is missing, and who might want to be part of shaping the journey.
This may include informal gatherings, creative conversations, circles, walks, fireside sessions and meetings with organisations already supporting young people.
Phase Two: The Crew
From this first phase, a smaller group will be invited into a longer learning journey.
This crew will spend time together on the land at Ghostwood Down and across the bioregion, exploring connection to place, community, creative practice, peer support and responsibility.
The journey may include regular gatherings, nature-based practices, creative inquiry, rites of passage, time with elders and skilled practitioners, and experiments that help participants bring what they are learning back into their lives and communities.
What might we explore together?
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What gives us a sense of direction, meaning or aliveness?
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How do we build relationship with the land, water, trees, paths and communities around us?
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What does it mean to become ourselves in a time of pressure, confusion and change?
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How do we practice trust, honesty, belonging and responsibility with others?
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How can art, story, music, movement and making help us express what is hard to say?
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How do we meet uncertainty without giving up on hope?
How to get involved
I’m a young person
Are you aged 18–25 and based around Bath, Bristol or the Avon bioregion?
We are gathering interest from young people who might want to join a conversation, attend a gathering, or be part of the longer Famous for Five Miles journey.
I’m a funder or supporter
We are looking for partners who want to support place-based youth work, intergenerational learning, nature connection and hopeful futures.
Your support can help us host gatherings, offer bursaries, pay guides, support transport, and build the wider village around the work.
I’m an organisation, mentor or community space
Do you work with young people, young men, land-based learning, creativity, mental health, youth work, rites of passage, community building or regeneration?
We would love to speak with you, learn from your experience, and explore possible collaboration.
Our Crew
Got questions? Get in touch to chat with one of the guides.
Mark Sears
Mark weaves together practices and techniques that explore how we might regrow a healthy culture through deep nature connection. He works with myth & oral storytelling, Way of Council and time spent alone in wild places as practices to deepen our connection so we might use our unique gifts in service to all life.
As a guide Mark has apprenticed as a nature based mentor with WildWise/Schumacher College. He has trained in the Way of Council with Pip Bondy of Ancient Healing Ways and apprenticed to myth and story with the West Country School of Myth. He is mentored by Annie Bloom who for many years was lead guide with Animas Valley Institute.
Evva Semenowicz
Evva is an experienced facilitator, ritual artist & somatic practitioner dedicated to weaving ourselves back into belonging; with our own bodies, each other and the wider collective of life.
Evva’s are with organisations such as Change in Nature, Open Edge Foundation, Embodiment Institute, & Bristol Yoga Roots Projects. Her teachings also come from walking this path and putting out offerings into the world.
Mark De’Lisser
Mark is a poet, youth mentor, space holder and creative. He has the privilege to work with organisations supporting young people who have experienced significant challenges and giving voice to young people experiencing racism. His work includes play therapy, mentoring, yoga programmes and creative writing workshops to support vulnerable children and young people.
Mark hopes his poetry can inspire stories of change, societally and personally, and that his words can help to nurture the seeds of reverence that are planted in all our hearts.
Dan Burgess
Dan helps people to see and feel the world and their place within it differently - as part of a larger entangled web of intelligent life. A Regenerative catalyst, imagineer and guide, committed to ongoing practice of connection and relationship to cultivate courage and our unique creative intelligence to step into service onboard this living Spaceship Earth.
As a guide training with Chris Salisbury/Wildwise, Betsy Perluss/School of Lost Borders, Bayo Akomolafe/We Will Dance with Mountains. Guest faculty Co-Creating the Emerging Future, Schumacher College,The Bio Leadership Project, Kincentric Leadership Cohort 23/24. Host of the Spaceship Earth Podcast.
Cost
Standard £400
This is the standard rate for the joining this experience, reflecting the cost of running it.
Supporter £550
If you are able to pay this rate it will support scholarship and youth in attending.
Scholarship and Youth £250
Limited number of reduced places if the standard rate prohibits you from joining
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