What Happens When Women in Social Finance Slow Down Together?
Last weekend, a group of women from the vibrant Women in Social Finance network gathered for their annual retreat in the Old Kitchen, tucked into Kenwood House, an artistic Georgian mansion on Hampstead Heath in London.
The first invitation was simple: to step away from job titles, mandates and transactions, and meet one another as humans first.
When do you feel in bloom?
What sparks a wholehearted yes in you?
What seeds are you quietly cultivating?
Questions that call on curiosity, generosity, courage and mutual visibility.
Throughout the day, we became a Thinking Environment where reflection, imagination, body and place continuously shaped one another.
In the morning, futures-thinking entered the room through weak signals and stories: glimpses of possible worlds woven around the life of a social finance professional investing in continuity and care. Close enough to resonate, distant enough to invite imagination.
Participants then created “artefacts from the future”: imagined objects carrying traces of the worlds they sensed emerging. They revealed values, fears, longings and possibilities that ordinary strategy conversations rarely make visible.
The meal itself became part of the practice too: spaces of uninterrupted attention, spacious listening, and conversation without rush.
Honouring a promise to herself, one participant stepped gently beyond her comfort zone and played guitar for us. That thing that happens when one is re-learning and daring to show up softened in the room.
A guided walk through Kenwood House and its paintings (among my favourites: A Rembrandt approaching death, with the two circles at the back, and Vermeer’s young woman with a yellow coat playing the lute) opened questions about beauty, power, inheritance, the end of life, and whose stories are preserved.
A vitality-full moment of QiGong with Claudia Cahalane brought us back into the intelligence of the body, reminding us that leadership, resilience and care are physical practices as much as intellectual ones.
The day slowly landed at the Spaniards Inn over conversations ranging from tea ceremonies to the hidden realities of tea and coffee production, especially for women whose labour often remains unseen and who regularly meet violence. Hope was invited in the shape of resources and knowledge that one another shared.
By the end, the retreat felt less like an event and more like a temporary ecology of attention:
a place where senior women in social finance could think together, rigorously, bodily, relationally and imaginatively, about the futures they are already helping shape.
“Thank you for your sisterhood and always supporting and promoting women trying to do something good in the world. You stand out in a big crowd. And, also, thanks for your truly awesome poetry”
Hi! I’m Servane. I help Impact teams navigate transition, crisis & conflict, and rethink relationships amidst turbulences🌿
If you wish to discuss how to create a warm day for relational wayfinding for your team/group, leave a message here.
