Why Wilder.Work?

A field of diverse flowers overlooking ancient woodland in Sitopia Farm, Greenwich
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Wilder.Work is what happened when the three worlds our founder, Holly Tennock, inhabited converged.  After selling her business in 2019 and re-qualifying as a professional coach, Holly coached local farmers in her home county of Kent. Here, she learnt regenerative farming techniques and found many could be applied in building better businesses. Resilient, natural energy filled businesses that self-regenerate.

Wilder.Work is the answer to the networking, coaching and away days our founder sought for the business she ground away at building for over ten years. Seeking a deeper sense of purposeful production. She and the amazing team she has gathered are Wilder.Work.

A field of diverse flowers overlooking ancient woodland in Sitopia Farm, Greenwich
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A woman holds a beautiful bunch of naturally grown flowers

Resilient, natural energy filled businesses that self-regenerate

Awareness is not enough. We need repeated practical opportunities to put our learnings into practice.

That’s is the vision for Wilder.Work.

Experiential learning and development of business strategy in rewilded places delivered by farmers, coaches and nature.

We only work with professionally accredited coaches, facilitators and trainers – but our farmers are all wild.

Together we have developed the first Wilder.Work products and cannot wait to share them with you.

We are launching a preview products – one for individuals and one for teams. 

Wilder.Works Days for entrepreneurs and leaders.

Wilder.Work Away-Days for teams.

Both will run at our initial two sites – one in central London and the other in East Kent

Re-wilding + business = so much more

Wilder.Work is about supporting people and businesses to regenerate in rewilded sites –  to multiple benefits of both sides.

The sum of our parts: rewilding + business = much more than the sum of our whole.

Learning business strategy through an ecological lens delivers endless fresh perspectives to drive resilience in your business. That’s a given.

For example – You can see and taste how good diversity is on a visceral level – how it builds resilience in crops, boosts yields and nourishes us far better than the alternative – mono-cropping. The metaphorical application in business is clear.

Learning whilst doing and experiencing with all of our senses – in fresh air and in beautiful, inspiring sites, is impactful on so many different levels.

Connecting over food grown in the ground you’ve just worked on, tasting salads you’ve plucked, amongst the scent of it growing. That beats the best restaurants.

But beyond all of this – your team is learning about our environment in a useful way you can all connect to. 

That means businesses will start to get it. Get the importance of regenerative farming and rewilding.

That’s what our farmers and rewilders care about. That’s why they’re in our business.

And our business – it’s about connecting the two – physically, intellectually and financially.

Our business model pays going rates for the rewilding sites and time. Then we also reinvest 10% of the profits we generate from delivering  the products we create on them back into the rewilding sites  annually so they can grow, to inspire future years of thinking, connecting and creating.

We’re growing our Wilder.Work soil for the long-term.

Two women hugging and smiling in a polytunnel
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Holly Tennock

Founder and Coach

As a successfully exited entrepreneur Holly loves coaching other founders on how they can find financial and mental freedom. Coaching them individually, in groups and across a team.

Holly founded PR agency, Journalista in 2009 built a team based on the values of equality, transparency, camaraderie and creativity.

Together the team delivered ground-breaking campaigns in data-led PR comms and marketing that drove positive social changes across education, science and healthcare sectors.

As CEO, Holly used her voice to speak about issues around diversity and inclusion in the PR industry and within SMEs. Journalista was one of the first agencies to sign up to a Charter of Intern Rights, campaigning against the industry practice of unpaid interns. It also invested 10% of revenue into pro-bono work throughout its ten years.

Holly won Outstanding Young PR Professional of the Year in both PR Moment and PR Week before turning 30 and the agency won a string of awards for media relations campaigns, impact and evaluation work – making Journalista the most awarded agency of its size.

After the sale of her business, Holly qualified as an EMCC accredited coach in 2022. She has supported a range of businesses and individuals bringing greater awareness to who they truly are and how to light up the world with their strengths.

Qualifications

Rebel Ed

Ed Kyrke-Smith or Rebel Farmer

Rebel Farmer is a tree surgeon by trade and a market gardener. He uses permaculture principles, No-Dig and regenerative methods to produce completely chemical free produce from a micro-farm in Kents Area of Outstanding National Beauty near the Wye Downs. Rebel Farmer builds his own soil by composting local waste products such as animal muck, bedding and fleece, spent mushroom waste, tree chippings, oak sawdust and even the waste of local breweries. Mimicking nature, he promotes biodiversity above and below ground by using this compost. He uses companion planting, to make the most of nature’s power. This increases biodiversity and means we are able to avoid all use of chemicals.

The Rebel Farmer brand can be seen across London and the South East, with crops including salads, bespoke soil grown microgreens and edible flowers. Rebel Farmer promotes and educates locally on Seasonal local produce and its importance in repairing the landscape avoiding climate change and building community resilience.

Working with local chefs, Rebel Farmer provides a market garden, growing local seasonal fruit and vegetables to order. This is a very important and rewarding relationship as it ensures the freshest produce goes straight from plot to plate.

Chloe Dunnet

Founder and Chief Grower at Sitopia

Chloë is Sitopia Farm’s Founder and Chief Grower. Ever since she pulled up her first home-grown bright orange carrots as a little girl, she has secretly dreamed of being a farmer.

For a long-time she did other things: working in rural Tanzania with an international development charity, and then managing significant policies and programmes in central government as a senior civil servant, sneaking in bits of volunteering on other people’s farms in her holidays.

But the dream persisted and so she completed an MSc in food policy at London’s City University as well as an urban food growing traineeship with Growing Communities.

She then worked at Fern Verrow, a biodynamic farm in Herefordshire, before returning to London in 2020 to set up Sitopia Farm.

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Rachel Jones

Photographer and stylist

A born and bred Londoner with a love of the outdoors, Rachel has a background in Environmental Science and worked as a sustainable development consultant for many years.

After tiring of life behind a desk, and realising that the frontline of sustainability was calling, she took the leap into farming in 2018.

After working for Farm of Ideas in Denmark, Growing Communities in London, getting her RHS Level 2 in Horticulture she happily joined Sitopia Farm in 2022 where Wilder.Work locates itself in London.

Rachel’s keen eye for seeing a story through her lens helps capture her to capture your special moments at Wilder.Work so we can share the beautiful photos with you.