This is the fourth episode of Do Radio Series, Where To Next?, hosted by Dan Kieran.

Dan came to Realisation 2025 and, for this episode, spoke with Roc Sandford and Sarah Wilson, two of our speakers.

Dan writes: "This is an incredible event that takes place over three days at St Giles House, the home of the Earl of Shaftesbury. I was thrilled first to meet Roc, who lives off-grid on the island of Gometra off the coast of Mull, and then Sarah Wilson, the former editor of Cosmoplitan and presenter of Masterchef in Australia who writes the extraordinarily successful Substack, This is Precious."

Find Dan's Substack, Following The Stag, for more.

Handicrafts, including knitting, sewing, cross-stitching, as a form of activism?

Speaking with Mark Vernon, Sarah explains how this quiet, multi-sensory, and mindful approach to pressing matters helps gather thoughts and process feelings.

She will be speaking and offering a workshop at the Realisation Festival 2026.

Arising from her own story and activist work, Sarah also discusses the crucial important of a space for inner reflection and compassionate conversation. Craftivism offers a form that is useful tool to protest without fuelling polarisation or burnout.

What campaigns and cases has it impacted? How might it extend activism? Might this be an activism for the non-activist, as well?

For more on craftivism see https://www.craftivist-collective.com/

For more on the Realisation Festival 2026 see https://realisationfestival.com/

There is another world that is also here and it can empower people in times of trouble. Kim Willis tells Mark Vernon that she stepped outside, bringing her expertise in systems thinking and the value of stories, to discover resources in England, Wales and Scotland that modern culture often overlooks.

She describes her discoveries and their impact in her new book, "No Fair Maidens", and will bring that energy to the Realisation Festival 2026. What difference can an imaginative encounter with enchantment bring? How do stories that are close to us meet us and empower us? Why do they much matter in a time when people are searching for positive ways of living? There are living myths waiting for our return to them!

For more on Kim’s book and work see - https://www.kim-willis.com/

For more on the Realisation Festival, including tickets, see - https://realisationfestival.com/

Can businesses today become a source of healing and regeneration? What shifts are required in our appreciation of money and wealth to make commercial organisations into living systems in the service of life? What inner work is required, both by leaders and society as a whole, to make this transition?

Speaker, transformation coach and thought leader, Nikki Trott, talking with Mark Vernon, explores some of the themes she will bring to Realisation 2026.

Her book is Sacred Business. Find out more here - https://www.nikkitrott.com/

For more on the Realisation Festival - https://realisationfestival.com/

Why does politics feel increasingly frantic, economics increasingly deluded, culture increasingly empty - even when led by seemingly good people?

Charles Foster explores how, at root, modern ways of life uncouple us from the heart of what makes us human: a love of horizons and edges. With that perspective lost, power is mostly about control, not allure, and society organises around safety rather than spirit.

What does this mean for notions like nation states and sciences of prediction? Drawing particularly on the work of Iain McGilchrist, Charles asks again about the meaning of life, individual and collective, by stepping towards uncertainty.

Charles is speaking with Mark Vernon and will be at the Realisation Festival, at St Giles House, Dorset, June 25-28, 2026.

For more about Realisation 2026 - https://realisationfestival.com/

For more about Charles Foster - https://charlesfoster.co.uk/

How can myths and fairytales help us, personally and collectively? What stories, often almost lost, can aid us with contemporary crises? Why does the imagination so very much matter?

Sharon Blackie will lead us in the exploration of these themes and more on the opening of the first day of the Realisation Festival, 2026. She will invite us to consider possibilities beyond the hero's journey and also how to draw on images, community and the land.

Sharon was talking with Mark Vernon.

For more on Sharon's work, not least her new book, Ripening, see https://sharonblackie.net/

For more on the Realisation Festival, see https://realisationfestival.com/

The Realisation Festival is a soulful response to the crises of our times. So, with two months to go before this year’s gathering, Nick Shaftesbury, Pippa Evans and Ed Haddon sat down with Mark Vernon to explore the shape of the programme this year.

Why does this space to share the complexities of today so much matter? What encounters are they hoping for? How might the big theme of story, that has emerged in planning this year, help us stay with confusion and worry, aspiration and hope?

Find out more about the festival online - https://realisationfestival.com/

The pre-festival in-person meeting on 21st April will be at Kairos in London. For more details, email olivia@realisationfestival.com.

Do listen to other episodes of the podcast, including conversations with economist Guy Standing and biochemist Pauline Rudd.

Guy Standing is an economist whose new book Human Capital: The Tragedy of the Education Commons has much to say about a key theme of the festival: bildung.

His thoughts on the corruption of education by policies that have lost touch with the public good are a provocative introduction to the kind of concerns explored when we meet.

In this conversation with Mark Vernon, Guy explores the extent of the challenges facing education in the 21st century, though his deep critique is, at once, an articulation of vision and what is means to be human.

As well as authoring a series of books on the commons, Guy is a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London and a founding member and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), a non-governmental organisation that promotes a basic income for all.

For more on Guy’s book see https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/461384/human-capital-by-standing-guy/9780241688182

For more on Guy’s work see https://www.guystanding.com/

For more on the Realisation Festival see https://realisationfestival.com/