Roisin Markham

The BDT Community Engagement Lab is a participatory learning by doing approach to strengthening capability and professional development towards community engagement. The following is an enterprise level approach to increasing capability for best practices in community engagement work. It could also be adapted for communties to strengthen their work with policy makers and planners.

Roisin Markham, the Innovation Services Director at BDT Consultancy has created this approach in response to being in rooms where the work is not community engagement. She has also expererienced professional requests where organisations talk about co-design but actual want communities to be convinced to just go along with what they have decreed. This is a type of power over violence that errodes human rights and our social contracts in a democracy. In light of the ongoing polycrisis and how our society needs to adapt and change we need to increase our professional capibilities to hold spaces well. So as a rejection of tick box exercises and for organisations and enterprises that want to create real meaning and innovation for people BDT is presenting BDT Community Engagement Labs.
This lab is built on Roisin Markham’s +25 years of experience of working in and with communities and networks, globally and hyperlocally.

This is your organisations invitation to move beyond business as usual.

Through a spiral model of praxis, a cyclical processes of action, reflection, and emergence. Creating regenerative rather than extractive approaches to a culture of participation, engagement and active democracy. It addresses the tension of business and economics, with values and impact work.

Teams may possess technical expertise but the gaps in

  • adaptive capacity to navigate complexity
  • building team and community capacity
  • legacy capability
  • do no harm
  • power dynamics and systemic inequalities

this is what the BDT Community Engagement Lab navigates.

Through this lab approach you and your team will be resourced to hold spaces. We will challenge current experiences and build regenerative practices that sustain.

“Design creates culture, culture shapes values, values determine the future”
 Robert L. Peters

Through deep work across different audiences, everything from big tech to local groups, corporate teams to womens groups and schools I’ve identified 8 domains

  1. Design as Culture – adaption and emergence, reclaiming relational practice, design as care and a decolinising practice vs. expert driven model, process over people, speed and efficiency as values, not my culture and professionalism as middle class whiteness.
  2. Be a Citizen – active citizenship and collective responsibility, including resistance, discourse without devisiveness, commonality as commons.
  3. Power and Privilege – addressing power, intersectionality, trauma-informed, building trust and coalitions, perceived threat and regulation of power dynamics – contested terrain dominant paradigms are challenged whilst alternative practices are built. This is rarely addressed.
  4. Futures Literacy – building capacity to use the future as a resource for present action, different futures privilege presents imagining alternatives changes what we detect, uncover and invent, moving beyond colonised imaginaries enables creative, experimental, participation towards innovation that matters and hope
  5. Storytelling – what are the ways we shape and share stories? how does that include or exclude people? What ways might we reclaim story telling and trusted word of mouth in communities of place, purpose and action?
  6. Success – bilingual capacity of dominant design culture + purpose impact measurement of values, what we are in service to – across kin, ecological, economic, local and global dimensions
  7. Emergent Strategy – embracing complexity, going where the energy is, addressing what needs attending to, labour and decentralised leadership
  8. Improvisation – developing adaptive capacity and creative responsiveness, complexity and novelty are resources rather then problems

The work maybe uncomfortable, difficult, necessary, and ongoing. As the learning teaches us, transformation happens through cycles of action and reflection, learning and unlearning, destruction and creation. Design culture will not change overnight, but it can change—one practice, one project, one team at a time.

Key Design Principles:

  • Responsive: Actively responding to what is required with foundational elements
  • Regenerative: Building practices that sustain rather than extract
  • Praxis: Cyclical learning through action, reflection, and emergence
  • Dialogical: Knowledge co-created through democratic participation
  • Care-informed: Grounded in feminist ethics of care and trauma-informed practice
  • Commons – creating with communities as a practice of commoning and agency, collective and shared ownership of what is created
  • Multi-scalar: Operating at individual, team, and organisational levels

Support Structure, four ways of working

Operating on four levels across the Community Engagement Lab, moving between a person, the team and the whole business or communties to ensure the work is grounded, builds culture and regenerative capabilities in whole team. The work will respond actively to what is required with foundational elements and to immediate needs:

  1. Weekly 1:1 mentoring with individual/s
  2. Project Team Coaching
  3. Peer to Peer Regenerative Praxis in the team & across an organisation
  4. Whole business training

This work is adapted and bespoke for partners as we create futures worth living into. We are not going to get to where we need to go by doing the things we have always done. Bringing people on that journey with us is important.
BDT Innovation Services welcomes meduim and long term engagements on our Learning Labs. Contact Roisin lets talk about your requirements.


The spelling mistakes are human error, neuro diverse gifts, no AI was used during writing. This Community Engagement Lab is the intellectual property of Roisin Markham and BDT Consultancy 2026. If you would like to refrence it in your own work please ask Roisin’s guidance and permission. In 2028 it may be moved into the creative commons but for now as we test and build the work forward it is our business, social and creative acumen.
Thank you for your attention and adherence here.

We look forward to hearing from you and exploring how this work can support yours.

edited 6 March 2026