Realife Learning

Frontline knowledge shapes conservation every day, but too often it has nowhere to go.

We're launching Learning Landscapes with the Southern African Wildlife College, working with Community Engagement Practitioners (CEPs) across the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area, expanding into Kavango-Zambezi TFCA.

Rather than another training programme, this builds a shared base from which frontline work is held and developed as its own recognised body of knowledge, something organisations, funders and policy spaces can recognise and draw on directly.

This is long-term work, built through reciprocal partnerships and working with and building on what is already happening. We're reaching out to organisations who employ CEPs, and to those doing capacity-building or holding networks across the region.

This is an open invitation. Want to get involved, or just follow along? Get in touch.

Photograph from our initial stakeholder engagement meeting. Many more to come.

The people who do the most navigating in conservation,who get called when wildlife crosses into village land, when grievances build, when a community feels the park is taking and not giving back, are often the least recognised and the least paid.

Community Engagement Practitioners work at the physical fenceline between protected areas and the communities that live alongside them. They hold the relationships. They absorb the tension. They do the slow, contested, sometimes dangerous work of repairing what's broken between people, place and institutions.
We think it's time conservation stopped treating this as peripheral work. The fenceline is the work.

Our latest Substack piece tells the story of Transforming the Fenceline: a course we developed with WWF and partners across the Greater Kruger landscape, working with 27 CEPs between 2023 and 2024.

The course is relaunching in 2026 in partnership with Southern African Wildlife College. Read the full piece here 👇

https://realifelearning.substack.com/p/transforming-the-fenceline

South Africans are being invited into a lie: that the tomato seller, the Somali shopkeeper, the Zimbabwean caregiver, the Mozambican worker and the undocumented refugee are why our society is falling apart. It's a lie that serves power. Xenophobia is a political technology — it turns hunger into hatred, unemployment into suspicion, and the poor against the poor, so that those who own the economy stay invisible. The system doesn't just fail to solve poverty. It regulates it: who may move, work, trade, study, belong and escape.

In this week's Learning playdate we let our bodies lead the meaning-making, not as a sensing tool, but as the decision-maker.

Anxiety became a tortoise retreating into its shell. Overwhelm became stillness, a quieting of the spine. Accountability pressure became the urge to run, until it didn't.
Somatic expression, sound, and the felt sense as a way of being with what's alive in the world right now (after Bruno Latour). Experimental. Playful. Hard to explain.

The question underneath it: what would change if we treated the body as a conscious collaborator, not just a vessel for our thinking?

*realife Learning's bi-monthly 30 minute playdate is open to anyone who wants to play with learning as play. It is an informal, trusting space where we experiment with learning engagement.

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realife Learning is proud to be a partner of the Ratanang Colab Colab, an emerging regenerative farm just minutes from the centre of Bushbuckridge in Mpumalanga. This is a reciprocal investment partnership, where we value not only the funds that are invested into the farm but also the relationships, networks and skills that everyone brings to the partnership.

During our trip to South Africa, we met with Chairperson, December Ndhlovhu to do an in-depth plan exploring how Ratanang can become economically independent with a small start-up fund. Drawing on the multitude of skills that the three Ratanang Directors have, along with using Asset Based Community Development (ABCD), to identify existing assets and opportunities on the farm, Ratanang has a three year plan towards becoming a valuable community farm.

Ratanang directors are already starting to implement this plan. If you would like to support Ratanang, please go to their website (https://ratanangcolab.org/get-involved) and hit the DONATE button.

Being in-person is a luxury these days, with rising fuel prices and the climate emergency. realife Learning founding partners, Ludwig Chanyau, and Alex Pretari met, for the first time after working together for 2 years online.

We were in Jo'burg to work with our partners, the . Over two weeks, we evaluated the first trimester of 2026 with IEJ and did two close out evaluation workshops.

A key insight we take away with us from this work is how, with justice work, the only constant is adaptation.

The Just Landscapes dialogue today looked at the growth of an agroecology movement in the Eastern Cape. Ludwig Chanyau shared the inspiring journey of a women farmers movement that has grown, over 20 years, to be 2700 members who grow food, save seeds and secure food. During Covid-19, this network of farmers became a safety net for local communities.

Ludwig's contribution triggered conversation around similar initiatives inAfrica and how people wanted to dialogue further about what we could learn from each other and how funding is misaligned to support long term agroecology movements.

Join us as we collectively learn what it takes for us to live in Just Landscapes. The zoom link can be found in the chat.