A Found Poem: a collective reflection by the Regenerative Futures Fund residents group

Our Residents Panel are a group of residents of Edinburgh who are involved in decision-making for Regenerative Futures Fund. They have been working together since Spring 2025. In late Summer 2025 we invited our residents to reflect on the experience of working together so far through online writing workshops. They wrote responses to each other’s questions and these were incorporated into a collective poem, called A Found Poem.

A Found Poem

A collective reflection by the Regenerative Futures Fund residents group.

There’s as many Edinburghs as there are people in Edinburgh

We each hold one the size of our hands

And, yes, they might not be what you need right now

But within them, hums that Edinburgh

The beginnings of the Edinburgh of 2035

Does it come from our buildings of stone?

The waves off the sea?

Or grow from people with which you share this ground?

Where do you notice it’s hum?

Can I ask where you notice it’s sound?

Because we’re choosing

Between the imaginations of different organisations

And that’s more than who holds what where and how

It’s the process of bringing and building and becoming Edinburgh together

It’s a process that’s collective

It’s a process that’s cultural

One that starts by making space for people to people

So take the hands beside you

And hold them

And focus

On listening

Because we’re learning to feel the balance of each-other

We’re still learning to be part of the balance of each-other

The balance of our living

The balance of our needing

Of bringing our being

To each-other

And sitting in that area

Between the edges of you and I

Are answers to those choices that aren’t yours or mine

That aren’t yes or no but words in the shape of the ones we live beside

In between what I need and what you know

In between the Edinburgh’s that our hands hold

Are decisions of commons

And a city that cares is built from decisions that are found not taken

And in that, we are all learning

And in that; residents, panel members, and organisations

We are all Edinburgh collectively happening