For organisations
A craft/art-based experience for leadership teams navigating change.
Rooted is not a team-building exercise. It is an invitation to slow down, make something by hand, and discover what becomes possible when people work alongside each other with focussed attention. For leadership teams navigating change, that kind of space is rare — and often exactly what is needed.
Why it works
The act of carving wood by hand creates conditions that are difficult to manufacture in a meeting room. Attention narrows. Conversation deepens. The material is itself — it responds to how you approach it, not to how you present yourself. Across an evening and two full days, something shifts.
We have seen this happen with leadership teams at moments of transition, with groups exploring how they want to work together, and with organisations trying to reconnect with what they are actually for. The experience does not prescribe outcomes. It creates the conditions for them.
How it works for groups
Private experience
Your team has exclusive use of the Priory for the evening and two full days. The experience is shaped around your group — its size, its context, and what you are working through. Dates are arranged to suit you.
Open cohort
Individuals and small groups from different organisations attend together. The mix of perspectives is often one of the most valuable parts of the experience.
Extended programme
For organisations wanting to go deeper, a series of experiences can be designed over time — returning to the Priory at intervals as the work of the group evolves.
Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
James Bond
Facilitator and founder
James Bond is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He studied sculpture at Central St Martin's and environmental art at Glasgow School of Art. He has been carving wood and deepening his practice for 50 years.
For over 35 of those years he has designed and led social art projects for families across the south west of England, with a particular focus on young men finding it hard to integrate into society. These projects are now run through Carving Community, a Community Interest Company he founded in 2011. In 2013 a police study found that one of his projects at Beacon Heath Arena Park resulted in a 98% reduction in anti-social crime in the area. He was presented to Her Majesty the Queen at Exeter University in the Jubilee year, and in 2009 was sent by the Home Office to The Hague to represent the UK in the European Crime Prevention Awards.
James started out as a trapper, fisher and hunter. From 13 to 16 he worked on a Devon country estate as a gamekeeper's assistant and woodcarver. He emigrated to New Zealand at 21, working in the timber industry and as a self-employed carver, theatre prop and set maker, before returning to the UK to complete his first-class honours degree at 30.
In 1995 he met cultural thinker James Hillman in Devon and was invited to study with him in the USA. He later became Artist in Residence at the Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California. Hillman's invitation to break art and creativity out into the everyday has shaped James's work ever since — taking creative practice into people's own settings and drawing others into a shared making as part of ordinary life.
In the past six years James has completed eight monumental public sculptures, commissioned through Teignbridge District Council and Housing Developers. These experiences have supported the development of the Rooted work.
Begin a conversation.
If you are considering Rooted for your team, we would welcome a conversation before you commit to anything. Get in touch and we will respond personally.
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