Ruth Potts

Ruth Potts is head of Regenerative Economics at Schumacher College, Devon, UK. She is a researcher, facilitator, artist and activist who also works for the Common Cause Foundation on a project exploring Values in the Media. She was previously a Senior Advisor on the Green New Deal in the office of the Green MP, Caroline Lucas.

Ruth is a leading member of the secretariat for the Global Alliance for a Green New Deal, an alliance of 27 lawmakers from 22 nations working collaboratively for transformative economic change. In 2020, Ruth brought together a transdisciplinary team to deliver Reset, an inquiry that opened up space for a broad cross-section of the UK public to explore their experience of the first Covid lockdown and discuss how they might want life to change so that it is greener and fairer.

Ruth was a senior lecturer in Ecological Design Thinking at Schumacher College, co-developing the innovative MA. She initiated and was Artistic Advisor to Utopia 2016: A Year of Imagination and Possibility at Somerset House, the Courtauld Institute and Gallery and King’s College London. Ruth was Head of Communications at NEF (the New Economics Foundation) for almost a decade where she helped shape the narrative of new economics, and was a co-editor of Red Pepper from 2016-2019. She is a co-author of The New Materialism, covered by the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Financial Times.

Ruth’s research and arts practice focuses on the phenomenon of political agency, following Donna Haraway’s demand that we ‘stay with the trouble’. Ruth is firmly committed to broadening perception of the possible, and was a member of the Cambridge Commission on Scaling Sustainable Behaviour Change and the Rapid Transition Task Force.