2025 has been a year defined by courage, community and collective action. Even as far-right rhetoric escalated, trans rights were attacked, genocide dominated global headlines and the cost-of-living crisis continued to squeeze families – communities refused to retreat.
Instead, people came together. They grew food, supported one another and demanded political action. Everywhere we looked, we saw the same truth: feminist climate justice doesn’t trickle down from institutions – it grows from the ground up.
Here are just some of our favourite moments from 2025 that show what collective power can achieve.
Growing Community Power with the Power of Food Festival
The Just FACT programme brought thousands of people together through the Power of Food Festival – ten days of community action, gardening workshops, film screenings, food-growing tours and conversations across Tower Hamlets.
It was a celebration of what happens when residents, not corporations, shape their own food systems. The festival made visible a truth we see every day: food justice is climate justice, and the people closest to the problem are also closest to the solutions.
As part of the festival, a portrait exhibition honoured the growers, organisers and local champions transforming their neighbourhood. Their faces and stories reminded us that food is more than nourishment; it’s a powerful connector, binding us to our cultures, our communities and to one another.
Photos from the Power of Food Exhibition
Just FACT Insights: Lessons shared for Food Justice Across the UK
This year, Wen also published a new series of Just FACT learning briefs, capturing five years of community-led food justice work in Tower Hamlets. These accessible summaries share what local growers, organisers and residents have learned about building resilient, just and low-carbon food systems – from community participation to circular waste solutions. By making these insights public, we hope other towns and cities can draw from this experience and accelerate their own journeys toward fairer, healthier and more sustainable food systems.
Spaces That Heal: Soil Sisters, Limborough Hub and Community Growing
From the flourishing community garden at Limborough Hub, where local women grow food and friendship, to the Soil Sisters therapeutic gardens supporting women in refuges, 2025 has shown the power of green spaces to nurture women’s wellbeing, confidence and collective resilience.
Soil Sisters grew again this year, opening a new site in Hackney. These green spaces in women’s refuges have become lifelines: places to breathe, rebuild confidence and reconnect with the earth and one another.
Limborough Community Food Hub – a vibrant integrated cook, grow and eat space in Poplar, East London – continued to be a thriving hub for workshops, gardening and community gatherings throughout the year bringing people together to deepen food knowledge, strengthen neighbourhood ties and build climate-friendly food skills.
End of year celebration – Limborough Community Food Hub
Creating Community Wellbeing Spaces: Clarion Hubs in Tower Hamlets
Building on this place-based work, 2025 also saw the launch of a new partnership with Clarion Housing through the Clarion Hubs pilot in Tower Hamlets. Over six months, we are developing two community wellbeing spaces – Butley Court Community Centre and The Old Workshop – as warm, inclusive places where residents can gather, connect and build resilience through food, culture and care.
Working alongside local volunteers, a dedicated Wen staff member is supporting residents to co-design activities shaped by community strengths, needs and cultural knowledge. The hubs aim to transform underused indoor spaces into vibrant, welcoming environments, embedding food and shared cultural practices as tools for connection, healing and empowerment.
The pilot focuses on reaching communities often missing from mainstream services, including Bangladeshi and Somali communities, older adults, and migrant women and men, through culturally sensitive outreach and trusted messengers. This six-month pilot lays the foundation for expanding the partnership with Clarion Housing and growing a model of community wellbeing rooted in care, dignity and shared power.
Climate Sisters Expands Across the UK
The Climate Sisters movement – led by racialised and marginalised women, often excluded from climate conversations – expanded this year into Manchester and the North West, and Scotland.
These new groups are building climate leadership grounded in lived experience, cultural knowledge, creativity and care. Whether through storytelling, art, community workshops or local organising, Climate Sisters showed that feminist climate action is not only possible – it’s thriving.
Exposing Toxic Chemicals and Demanding Safe Period Products
Together with our partners at Pesticide Action Network UK, we published our Blood, Sweat and Pesticides Report – which found that tampons available on our high streets contained traces of a pesticide glyphosate at levels 40 times higher than the legal limit for drinking water. The findings sparked widespread media coverage and public concern.
During Environmenstrual Week, we took the campaign to Westminster, hosting an event at the House of Lords with scientists, medics, activists and parliamentarians. And in November, Wen delivered our #ToxicFreePeriods petition with almost 80,000 signatures to Downing Street and DEFRA – demanding full ingredient disclosure and regulation of all period products. The message from the public was unmistakable: people want transparency, accountability and safe period products.
The Toxic Free Periods petition – taken to DEFRA and Downing Street and the House of Lords event
Green Baby Day, Coalitions and Protecting Future Generations
In June, Wen marked Green Baby Day, raising awareness of toxic chemicals in toys and supporting families to make safer choices. Through a national campaign, resources and a free webinar, we helped parents and carers navigate the confusing landscape of toxic chemicals in everyday items – and called for systemic change to protect all children.
We also initiated the Green Baby Coalition, building a united front for better chemical regulation, healthier environments and justice for future generations.
Building Knowledge and Community Leadership
Wen continued training Environmenstrual Ambassadors in London and Manchester, equipping volunteers to deliver workshops and community outreach on menstrual health, sustainability and chemical safety.
Our participatory research project Food Lives, with the University of Sussex, continued its work documenting how people experience food and food systems. Through food diaries, shop-alongs, conversations and storytelling, the project revealed truths too often missing from policy debates. In 2025, the research was shared at conferences across the UK and beyond – helping shift how policymakers understand community food realities.
Honouring Wen’s Feminist Environmental Changemakers
This year, Wen celebrated our contributions to environmentalism when both Helen Lynn (Senior Consultant and Research Fellow at Wen) and Zarina Ahmad (Co-Director of Wen) were recorded as part of the British Library’s Oral History of the Environmental Movement.
Led by Royal Holloway, University of London, the project is creating a new national archive of 100 life-history interviews with environmentalists from across the UK, preserved within the British Library Sound Archive.
Their inclusion ensures that intersectional feminist environmental leadership — so often under-recognised — is formally recorded in the historical record. It honours decades of activism, research and community organising, and makes space for future generations to hear directly from women who have helped shape the UK’s environmental justice movement.
Looking Ahead
If 2025 taught us anything, it’s this: when women and racialised and marginalised communities lead, change becomes not only possible – but unstoppable.
From community gardens to Parliament, from neighbourhood kitchens to national coalitions, this year has shown what we can build when we act with care, courage and solidarity.
As we step into 2026, we carry forward the strength of every grower, campaigner, mother, survivor, volunteer, sister and neighbour who made this year what it was.
We invite you to join us in 2026 as we continue building a safer, fairer and more sustainable world – together.
