Programme leadership, strategic storytelling, and change-making growth
A portfolio in nature-based renewal
Hello…
I’m Sam Williams and this is Reflexive Ecology
Working at the intersections of ecological recovery, social innovation and wellbeing, I’m a project manager and impact-growth specialist supporting regenerative transitions.
Portfolio
Supporting purposeful organisations
From nature restoration and rewilding to health, education and experience facilitation, I offer collaborative leadership engaged in care, connection and innovation.
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Founders of the Integrated Rights Framework, Nature’s Rights is a leading rights of nature charity in the UK. With the support of 200+ civil society organisations, they also authored the UK Nature’s Rights Bill currently going through parliament and have done similar work in the EU.
I’ve been supporting the charity with fundraising, communications and operations consultancy, including managing donor relations, setting up their advisory board, and building the capacity for leading the rights of nature movement in the UK.
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Celebrating stories of meaningful exploration, Wildside Journeys is a global community of storytellers aiming to shift dominant narratives in adventure travel and outdoor lifestyles. Hosting creatives from around the world, this is where people, landscapes and the more-than-human meet.
As co-founder and associated editor, I contribute articles and photo essays mostly exploring human relationships with the wilderness, as well as musings on what I call "emergent adventure": the space where experiential movement meets nature connection in a living world.
www.wildsidejourneys.com
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My dad and I found an old horse box in a field, and set about rebuilding it as a mobile sauna. Doing things the old fashioned way, we sourced local materials, milling and processing Dartmoor timber before combining with a top-of-the-range Scandinavian woodburner.
Sharing the sauna, together with a farm-made shower and plunge pool, for weddings, parties and retreats, this has become a small local business encouraging healthy, nature-connected lifestyles, embodied connection and social get-togethers in beautiful places.
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The Mountains are Gods is an emerging project exploring stories of sacred mountains. Mountain people have for millennia understood these great structures as living, intelligent or agential beings. This work asks what we might learn from this as we attempt to adapt to the Anthropocene.
The aim is simply to meet the more-than-human mountains and to hear their stories. With thanks to support from Local Futures and Navdanya Earth University, this project weaves travel writing, ecological anthropology and the rights of nature.
India’s Nanda Devi, part one: encountering a mountain goddess
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Many of us yearn to re-entangle ourselves with the more-than-human world, to re-align our bodies to the rhythms of nature, and to rekindle what it means to be “home”. The Land-Based Living Collective is a response to this call, and is a growing movement nurturing low-impact land-based lifestyles.
Building beautiful straw bale, timber and earthen buildings, I supported the organisation with management consultancy, programme development and coaching. I was also lucky enough to roll up my sleeves and help with construction projects in Devon, Cornwall and the Cotswolds.
www.landbasedliving.com
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The world over, local communities work tirelessly to protect and restore the places they love from the impacts of the climate and nature crises. The Conservation Collective is a global network of local foundations funding these effective grass-roots initiatives.
Providing programme management for a large-scale biodiversity mapping and ecosystem restoration project, I coordinated partners in the UK and Spain, including experts in ecology and nature finance, community groups, private sector sponsors and the University of Seville.
www.conservation-collective.org
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Beginning as pandemic-era walks on Dartmoor, Untitled Immersions is a small collaboration that aims to share the therapeutic benefits of being in nature. Coming together for reflection, connection and peace, we support relaxed, unpretentious experiences in the wild.
Non-profit and no logo, we run two immersions each year. We do this to receive and share the incomparable gifts of sleeping under the stars, bathing in the rivers, and reconnecting with the ecology of which we’re part. Each experience has been uniquely powerful.
No website, no logo!
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A CIC at the intersection of art, academia and activism, Radical Ecology explores imaginative transformations in response to our planetary crises. Their purpose is to decolonise the environmental justice movement through research, events, exhibitions, campaigns, and innovative collaborations.
I supported the team with growth and communications consultancy and project management. As well as building their fundraising pipeline, and writing bids, I also supported with programme design, event production, proposition development and stakeholder management.
www.radicalecology.earth
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Alethean Lifeworlds is an exploration into light as a medium through which we experience life, the world, and memory. Understanding nature as physis, it is a record of serendipity and the meeting of places, people and the more-than-human, as well as how the past and future-present collide.
From expeditionary photography to landscapes and portraits, this project that emerged through travel, mountaineering and working overseas. In an era of attention-grabbing, social media ready content, maintaining this small photoblog has been a small attempt to give light to past experience.
About
Nature connection as participatory action
Working with purposeful organisations, partnerships and campaigns, I provide systems-based social enterprise leadership, project management, consultancy and delivery.
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A programme manager, consultant and impact-growth specialist, I collaborate in movements towards place-based systems change, environmental recovery, physical and mental health (often centred on movement), and regenerative transitions centred on living systems.
With nearly two decades in health, education and technology, I have worked with leading universities, NGOs and businesses in the UK, Europe, Africa and the Americas. I have collaborated with brilliant, diverse leaders from Nobel-prize winners to indigenous communities.
My current interests centre on the rights of nature, nature-based approaches social, economic and environmental renewal, embodied healing and growth through experience, and storytelling. I am based in Devon, UK, where I grew up in and where much of my work is grounded.
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Starting at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, my early career included research and development roles at the Institute of Development Studies, UCL’s Institute of Education and Goldsmiths University of London, and the London Business School.
After founding an award-winning adventure travel social enterprise, which later evolved into Wildside Journeys, I held senior roles in health technology in the US (Managing Director of Corporate Health) and public health policy in the UK (Enterprise & Communications Director).
With a BA in History and an MA in Anthropology & Politics (London) - and training in social enterprise leadership (Cambridge), systems theory (ETH Zurich) and human-centred design (IDEO) - I maintain interests in ecological anthropology, process philosophy, and deep/social ecology.
In 2024, I received the Radical Seeds Fellowship awarded by Emergence Magazine (Kalliopeia Foundation), in 2025 I trained in Sustainable Woodland Management (Centre for Alternative Technologies), and in 2026 I studied Gandhian Ethics & Leadership at Navdanya Earth University.
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Entrepreneurial in nature, action-orientated in practice, and empathy-based in style, I employ highly adaptive programme management and relational leadership for a range of interconnected sectors and causes close to my heart. This work is broadly falls into the following:
Products and services: I design, deliver and enable collaborative efforts towards impactful outcomes within a focused, risk-managed strategic framework. While contextual and values-based, I offer operational leadership that provides meaningful and sustainable results.
Communications: Whether local or global, I offer human-centred strategic communications, storytelling and digital transformation, as well as proposition design and the production of brands, campaigns, events, and other facilitated, curated and guided experiences.
Growth: Drawing from international experience of B2C, B2B and B2G fundraising, sales and partnerships, I offer sustainable growth services including commercial, philanthropic and enterprise strategies, pipeline development, network/CRM management, bid writing, and more.
