Fellows have been meeting across cities, countries and continents to discuss the power of connection in the RSA’s event highlight of the year.
Fellows Festival 2025 proved to be the biggest, boldest and best yet, with gatherings taking place across the UK and in the US, Canada, Japan and Oceania.
Hundreds of Fellows met in person or online to hear from inspiring speakers, to network and to enjoy great art, great food and great company. Festival events took place in Cardiff (15 May), Brighton and Manchester (16 May), Bath, Birmingham, Edinburgh, London, Osaka, Seattle and Canada (17 May), and across Oceania (19 May). One further event is planned for Tokyo on 21 May.
Now in its fourth year, Fellows Festival has become firmly established as the highlight of the RSA’s annual event calendar. Introducing the London festival, RSA CEO Andy Haldane said that the geographical range of the events made the overall theme – the power of connection – particularly appropriate.
“We started life as a coffee house, as a place for getting together, bringing together people from different backgrounds, disciplines and professions to make good things happen. More than 270 years on, and that is still what we are doing,” he told Fellows in The Great Room at RSA House and online.
“We’ve moved location, but the ethos and the approach is just the same. And, in some ways, the power of connection is even more compelling in an age of social media than it was 270 years ago.”
We started life as a place for bringing together people from different backgrounds, disciplines and professions to make good things happen. More than 270 years on and that is still what we are doing.
The keynote address at the London Fellows Festival was delivered by Baroness Armstrong, Chair of the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods and the Founding Chair of the Government’s Digital Inclusion Action Committee.
In a moving speech, she described her experiences growing up in the North East of England and her conversations with people around the country as part of her role at both the commission and action committee. The former Minister for Social Exclusion under Prime Minister Tony Blair described a situation more than 20 years on, where people are isolated, lonely, and unable to work or attend jobcentre appointments because of poor transport networks.
“If we want growth in this country, if we want to be a dynamic country, we’ve got to tackle issues like this. We all have a responsibility to ensure that wherever people are born, whatever their parents do, we find ways to get opportunities for them,” she said.
Armstrong described her visit to a local digital inclusion hub, which helps develop basic IT skills but also provides social interaction for attendees. “They all said that the most important thing about the hub was that they could come together and meet other people, and they were learning things that enabled them to get engaged with public services.”
Social infrastructure, such as community centres, sports clubs, and mother and toddler groups, is the bedrock of social connection, she stressed. And social connections give people the confidence to take a course, get a job, volunteer or quit habits that are making them ill.
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The commission has identified 613 ‘mission-critical’ neighbourhoods where local people are furthest behind on the government’s five missions. It wants to help build the social infrastructure in these and other places that used to be supported through government programmes such as Sure Start.
Armstrong said that those areas that lacked social infrastructure were far more likely to suffer from poor health outcomes, higher levels of crime and lower levels of employment. “I actually do think getting rid of Sure Start was one of the most stupid decisions ever made in this country,” she added.
We all have a responsibility to actually ensure that wherever people are born, whatever their parents do, we find ways to get opportunities for them.
The lack of social connection was seen most disturbingly in the response to last year’s attacks in Southport, where three young children were killed and ten injured at a local dance class. The initial reaction from people in the community was one of unity and support for the victims and their families, but there followed a series of protests and riots where bricks were thrown at a mosque and petrol bombs at the police.
Patrick Hurley, the MP for Southport and former RSA North of England Fellowship Engagement Manager, told delegates that the riots were sparked by misinformation on social media, and that the ‘informal interventions’ that would have taken place in the past were not now so readily available. He put this down to an “atomisation of society” over the past two decades.
“Religious communities hadn’t been speaking to each other. There was no interfaith forum. People had found like-minded communities online at the expense of geographic-based communities. So they weren’t speaking to their neighbours – they were speaking to people who agreed with each other on social media, and just going down this rabbit hole of reinforcing each other’s views.
“What we need is to get back to a sense of having people rooted in the places where they live and where they work, to make sure that they don’t seek validation when what they need is a friendly hand on the shoulder to say ‘don’t do that’.”
People weren't speaking to their neighbours – they were speaking to people who agreed with each other on social media, and just going down this rabbit hole of reinforcing each other's views.
Luke Tryl, Director of More in Common UK, described the research undertaken by his organisation, which showed the increasing isolation of people since the COVID-19 pandemic. Work colleagues socialise with each other less frequently, people prefer to connect with friends via social media, and entertainment can be more easily and cheaply accessed online.
“I do not think you can build a cohesive society when people have turned away from each other like that,“ he said. “Our lives have been slowly turning inward for quite a while now.”
The conversation inevitably turned to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s recent assertion that Britain “risked becoming an island of strangers” if immigration levels are not cut. Tryl acknowledged the controversy that this had created, but said that the mistake had perhaps been in limiting the argument to immigration.
“Immigration and integration are important parts of that discussion. But it’s also about that sense of dislocation. It’s the people I speak to week in week out who say I can’t go down to the local high street anymore – it only has charity shops, the local parks are vandalised, and you can’t get a reliable bus service to get out there.”
One potential way of responding to communities that feel abandoned or unsafe is the introduction of universal basic infrastructure (UBI). This concept focuses on the provision of a minimum standard of services and amenities – including healthcare, education, public transport, municipal parks and libraries, cinemas and sports clubs – for everyone, no matter where they live.
Mike Kenny, Professor of Public Policy at Cambridge University and Director of the Bennett Institute, said that UBI was not aiming for utopia. “We’d all love everything to be fully funded and shiny. We know that’s not the case. But we ought to have a conversation as a society about what we think is a reasonable offer.”
I do not think you can build a cohesive society when people have turned away from each other. Our lives have been slowly turning inward for quite a while now.
The London event also included Great Room discussions on strengthening communities through arts and culture, free speech and cohesion, and educating for connected societies. There were additional sessions across RSA House on the work of young Fellows, urban design, the shift to social capitalism, and the success of RSA interventions such as Playful Green Planet and RSA Spark.
There was also an extensive fringe arts programme and magazine fair. Fellows were able to sample music, art, comedy, storytelling, food, exhibitions and displays. And, of course, the opportunity to socialise in the RSA’s new cocktail bar, Muse.
Nature-based learning
Playful Green Planet transforms green spaces into ecologically thriving outdoor playrooms and classrooms that grow all children’s ecological citizenship.
Achieve impact
RSA Spark welcomes students from across the globe to grow and apply their agency, skills and creativity to real-world briefs that do more good for people, places and the planet.
In his final Fellows Festival as CEO, Haldane closed the London gathering by thanking Fellows for their support and encouragement. ‘You are the beating heart of the RSA. You always have been and you always will be, and nothing demonstrates that better than events like today. Thank you for making it so. Thank you for making it joyful, and all power to your elbow in the future.”
Watch the Fellows Festival 2025 London
Did you attend the Fellows Festival? Maybe you weren’t in London, but perhaps you joined one of our regional events or participated online? If you’re a Fellow, you can share your highlights on the Fellows Festival 2025 Circle.
