From Outsider to Beyonder: Activism, Planetary Health, and the Freshness of a Seasonal Community
Details
- Interviewee: Rita Issa
- Role: Doctor, activist, Feytopian
- Community: Feÿtopia
- Location: chateau du fey
- Date: 2026-05-02
- Language: English
Summary
Rita is a doctor based in the UK with a deep history of political organizing: student occupations, anti-tuition-fee campaigns, collective houses, and UK gatherings run on Burning Man principles. She came to Feÿtopia in summer 2020, exhausted from Covid-era hospital work, writing a master's thesis, and invited by a friend in Ed Cooke's circle.
What she found was a beyonder space. In theories of change, insiders work within systems, outsiders oppose them, beyonders imagine outside the current paradigm entirely. Her previous community experience had been built on fighting things. Feÿtopia was built on building something.
This shifted her model of money and capitalism. Meeting Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who were not evil as she had expected, she began to see financing as morally neutral. Through Feÿtopia she met the people who became the Planet Health Network, running eight events of 20 to 50 people connecting frontline health workers, climate builders, blockchain technologists and UN figures. From there she co-founded a company with Jordan and Jeremy aimed at reimagining global health financing.
She also co-founded a community house in London with Alex, another Feytopian, seeding it from the values she encountered here.
Her key structural insight about Feÿtopia is its seasonal model: the fresh turnover means nothing stagnates. And the governance paradox she arrived with, an activist instinct for collective ownership, resolved when she saw why clear decision-making had let this place flourish where her earlier consensus models had not.
Key quotes
What I found really interesting here, what felt like a kind of mind expansion, was that this was a community coming together over a shared positive future, rather than existing as an anti to what currently is.
I feel I am able to be my fullest self here, in all the parts of myself. Whether artistic or intellectual or silly or heady or somatic, I can embody all of those aspects, and they are all accepted and welcome in the space.
It was not people who had completely dropped out of society and moved to an off-grid eco-community. It was people doing a lot in the world, having a real impact, fully in the world and also living in community.
I now see why this place has flourished and succeeded the way it has. It is because there has been a clear decision-maker.
Transcript
---
interviewee: Rita
community: Feytopia
location: France
featured_in_posts: none
transcript_format: clean
themes:
- Values
- Community
- Activism
- Collaboration
- Belonging
- Governance
notes: |
Heavily cleaned from ASR-generated raw transcript. Speakers reconstructed.
Rita's last name is uncertain in the source (ASR rendered it "Retail" which is clearly wrong); verify with Sharon before publishing.
Company name flagged "[name uncertain in source]" needs verification (sounded like UNHCR but is actually a startup co-founded with Jordan and Jeremy for global health financing, not the UN agency).
Recording ended abruptly mid-conversation; the cleaned transcript closes at the last complete exchange.
---
# Interview Transcript: Rita
**Community:** Château de Fey / Feytopia
**Interviewer:** Sharon Avraham
---
**Sharon:** Let's start with your name and where we are sitting.
**Rita:** My name is Rita, and we are sitting in Feytopia.
---
**Sharon:** How did you first hear about this place?
**Rita:** I was first invited to come in the summer of 2020 with a group of friends, during Covid, when there was an easing of lockdown. Ed Cooke, who is now Jess's husband, was curating a group of people to come here. They wanted a combination of entrepreneurs, philosophers, and hippies or artists.
I was in the third category. I came, stayed for a month that first summer, and have been coming back ever since.
---
**Sharon:** What was happening in your life when you got the invitation? Why did you choose to come?
**Rita:** It is interesting that I was in the artists and hippie category, because I am a doctor. I was working in hospitals during Covid and I was incredibly tired. I had to write my master's thesis, which I was doing on the side.
I had a period of time off, and the invitation seemed like a good chance to have time and space to write, to be in the countryside, in nature. That first summer of lockdown was a kind of experiment for the community here, inviting people to live and work here rather than using the venue just as an event space.
---
**Sharon:** What was your relationship with the concept of community before you first showed up here?
**Rita:** Since I was about 20, I have been obsessed with community.
At my university in 2010 or 2011, students created an occupation. We took over a central hall to protest the rise in tuition fees. Those six weeks of living together, organizing and cooking together, felt like the most alive time of my six-year degree. Off the back of that, a group opened a political space where we provided education for the local population.
I became quite used to living with other people in a way that went beyond a house share. We came together in shared purpose, cooked together, cooked for a wider community, set goals, and made many decisions through consensus. So I was very used to group decision-making dynamics.
After that, until I moved here, I also lived in places more like co-housing in London, often groups of five. Varying degrees of involvement in cooking together, buying food together, and so on.
Coming here was not a new or novel experience. It also felt like an extension of something we had been testing out in the UK, where we would hire out big houses in the countryside for three days or a week and go live and organize and co-create together.
Those groups came together around Burning Man principles, even though at that point none of us had ever been to a burn. We had read about it online, thought it sounded cool, and would organize gatherings with meal leads and waste leads and transport and timetabling. It was with that group that I was initially invited to come here.
---
**Sharon:** How did the first few steps into this place feel for you? What were the values you were searching for, and what were the values embodied in the space?
**Rita:** I had spent a lot of time in community spaces, but those spaces had always been incredibly political, organized around a shared political orientation. Particularly the fight against something: the fight against the rise in fees, against landlords, against privatization of the health system, against climate change.
What I found really interesting here, what felt like a kind of mind expansion, was that this was a community coming together over a shared positive future, rather than existing as an anti to what currently is.
So this place felt to me more like a beyonder model, if I can explain. In theories of change, political theories of change, you can try to influence systems from within. Those are insiders. You can be outside the system but still facing toward it. Outsiders. A lot of the political organizing I had done before was outsider work: protest, creative disruption, activism. Then beyonders are people trying to imagine something that exists outside the current structure or paradigm.
There was something about coming here, being in nature, and meeting a lot of entrepreneurs, where I thought, oh, people are just building something very different.
Part of what I found compelling was that I arrived here with a very negative idea about money and capitalism. I met Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and they were not evil the way I had thought. It was really interesting to have that mental model changed. I realized that one of the ways change can happen in the world is by building things that are really cool, and that money or financing around that does not necessarily have a moral value attached to it.
I found it interesting to experience something new, very different from the communities I had been in in London. That was part of the reason I kept coming back.
---
**Sharon:** Can you give an example from your experience? You came from this activist and oppositional background. What did you experience being built here in this beyonder space?
**Rita:** At the time, in the early 2020s, there was a big convergence here around people who had been working on blockchain in various forms. They worked on it from a builder perspective, with a real hope or vision that it would steward in a new economic model, shared ownership, shared governance, outside the current economic paradigm.
It was cool to meet them. The other thing that felt different here from my communities at home was that the community around Feytopia is very accepting. Accepting of not saying things right all the time, not aiming to act or perform in a particular way. There is a lot of diversity in perspectives and in how people communicate, and people are accepted where they are at.
Whereas around that period within the leftist movement, there was a real pressure to say everything right or act right. Here it was a lot more accepting. That felt really beautiful to experience.
---
**Sharon:** Do you have any tangible example? You said you met all of these crypto people from Silicon Valley and they were not what you expected. I feel the buzz of opportunity here too, and I am curious if anything tangible actually emerged from these collaborations.
**Rita:** It is interesting when you think about tangibility, and what we measure as having value or impact.
Imagination and the realm of possibility are really important, and there is a lot of that here, talking about things and thinking about how things can be different. There have also been collaborations formed, and companies.
One of the things we ended up creating off the back of meeting some of these blockchain people was a network called Planet Health Network. We brought frontline and community health workers, people working on climate issues, builders and tech people, financial people, and folks from the UN, into the same room. Putting people together who would not otherwise be together, and allowing for some cross-pollination.
At the very least, beautiful friendships are formed. Some cool projects come out of it. Whether or not they are successful depends on what your metrics of success are.
---
**Sharon:** I am also interested in the few steps afterwards. Beyond the project itself. We do not need to chase every measurable impact point, but it is interesting to see whether it is more than just talking the talk. That can be as small as a process between two people, or as big as opening a company together or starting a book club.
**Rita:** I can give a few examples. Off the back of the Planet Health Network, which has now run about eight events of 20 to 50 people for four or five days, people came together and collaborated.
I was introduced to Alex, who is also working on climate and health issues, and Tony, who is a lawyer and blockchain person. Together we first pulled together this idea of Planet Health Network. Then other people came into it, including Alex's brother, and Jordan and Jeremy.
There were a few examples of organizations that came out of that network. Myself, Jordan, and Jeremy started a company called [name uncertain in source]. It was trying to reimagine global health financing and make financing more accessible for community groups. It is still being built, and it has been a slow, hard slog. I cannot say we have raised a hundred million or anything like that. We have not. But we have spent a long time trying to define and build this thing, to make it work. Even attempting something like that came out of the collaboration and networks formed here.
We had an event here a couple of years ago and invited some indigenous elders, including an elder from Alaska and an elder from Tonga. They realized they straddle the Pacific and both have whales central to their communities. They decided to create a corridor of whale protection between their lands. The network rallied around them in support and in ways to help. Then it was picked up by another organization that has taken it on. The initial seeds of ideas and connections and facilitation came from here.
---
**Sharon:** How does it feel to collaborate at this level with the people here? What does it mean for you and your values, and how you want to live your life?
**Rita:** The other thing to add is that Alex, who I met here, and I have gone on to set up a community house in London. The vision and values were seeded from our experience here.
Foundationally, I have always found the way most people live to feel very confusing. I really like being around people. It makes sense within my value system and my political views that we do not need to live in tiny units. My sense is that everybody lives in their small unit with their partner and their children, and each person owns a washing machine and a dryer and a car, and all this equipment, and everybody has to come home and cook for themselves and their family every day. All of these resources can be shared. This labor can be shared.
There is something of capitalism selling that story and selling separation, because that is what makes it profitable. The idea that you need to be better than your neighbor, that you need to own all this stuff, otherwise you are not equal. That is what drives consumption.
So there is something that feels foundationally important to me about coming together, sharing resources, sharing time. Especially time that is so often invisible, unpaid labor, often taken on by women, whether it is childcare, tidying the house, cooking. That can be shared within a community.
In our house in London, and in previous houses I have lived in, instead of cooking a small meal for yourself every day of the week, three times a day, you cook more but do not have to do it as often. That is pleasurable. It saves your time. It means you actually put effort into what you are making because you are serving it to your friends and your community.
It feels like a foundationally important part of my value system, to live in a collective way.
---
**Sharon:** What did you experience here that empowered you, or allowed you to think, okay, I want to live with these people long term, I want to move in, I want to share a big house?
**Rita:** As I moved through my 20s and into my 30s, even my most political friends, the most idealistic or visionary of us in our early 20s, over time everybody trended toward the norm of what was expected of people in London. They met somebody, they began to settle down, they began to purchase things together as a couple. Maybe they moved into their own flat, or they bought a house, because you can only afford to buy a one- or two-bed flat in London if you are lucky. Then they had children. Then they moved out to the suburbs to afford a bigger place.
That story was just replicating around me. There was something about coming here and meeting other people who simply were not conforming to that story. Just meeting people in their 30s or 40s or 50s who had not done that. Having that modeled to me was inspiring just by itself.
That was probably the most important thing about coming here. Everything else, like cooking together or doing a washing-up shift or helping each other out, I had experienced in other communities before. That did not feel unique to this place. What felt unique here was the type of people who were here.
It was not people who had completely dropped out of society and moved to an off-grid eco-community. It was people doing a lot in the world, having a real impact, fully in the world and also living in community. Up until that point I had always thought it would be a trade-off. Either you live in the city and you do impactful, important things, or you move off grid into nature and community and have a nice separate life but you are not engaged with the challenges of the world. Here it felt like people were doing both.
Part of the reason that sustains is because of the seasonal model. This place closes for community season, and everybody goes back out into the world and does their work. Then they come back the following year with fresh ideas and perspectives and projects. Having that seasonal turnover, and within each season people passing through, means there is constantly freshness and new ideas coming in.
I have not spent much time in long-term communities that have the same members over decades. I have friends in the UK who moved to a small town during lockdown, and they say, we are just in our bubble of each other, nothing new ever happens, no freshness comes in. So maybe that is something unique about Feytopia that is not mirrored in other communities.
---
**Sharon:** How have these days affected your life, and your perception of self?
**Rita:** The worst answer I can give is that I did not realize people could be so rich that I would ever know somebody who was that rich. I had gone from being friends with public sector workers in the UK to suddenly meeting people who were multi-multi-millionaires because they sold their company. That was an interesting perspective reframe on my life. I do not think it tangibly changed my life in any way. It was just something I had never even conceptualized.
On a personal level, Feytopia has allowed me to feel like a very well-tuned violin. One of my friends asked me, why do you go to that castle in the countryside, that weird place? The answer I give is that I feel I am able to be my fullest self here, in all the parts of myself. Whether artistic or intellectual or silly or heady or somatic, I can embody all of those aspects, and they are all accepted and welcome in the space.
Being allowed to do that in a space feels very good in my body. That is why I keep coming back.
---
**Sharon:** Is there an element of your path of growth that you can tie to your relationship with this space?
**Rita:** Every experience in life, whether good or bad, is part of a path of growth, so of course this has been part of that. Coming to a space where I am allowed to be the biggest, boldest version of myself is expansive.
---
**Sharon:** What is the most challenging aspect of this space for you, personally and otherwise?
**Rita:** When I first came here, I found the ownership model challenging. All my models of community before had been about collective ownership and full collective decision-making, which would mean three-hour meetings every other day to come to consensus.
Initially, not having that here, I did not understand it. I could not hook it onto a value system that made sense to me.
On the flip side, I now see why this place has flourished and succeeded the way it has. It is because there has been a clear decision-maker.
That has played with my mental model of what makes communities work. If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have said equal share, equal say. Maybe that is not so much the case anymore.