Convening a nation: Lucy Knill on leadership, collaboration and Anthropy

There are events that inform and events that transform. Anthropy is designed to do the latter, turning three days at the Eden Project into a living rehearsal for a better Britain: more united, more sustainable, more equitable, and more confident about what comes next.

At the center of that transformation is the leadership required to convene it. Anthropy’s CEO, Lucy Knill’s account of building this unique gathering reads like a case study in steady nerve. What began as “a little bit of event support”
quickly revealed itself as a national-scale undertaking.

Instead of starting with a purchase order, she describes a blank-page reality: “We had to raise every penny that was going to make it happen and persuade people to commit based on absolutely nothing. We had no photographs, no videos, no proof of concept.” Demonstrating leadership in its most practical form: converting uncertainty into a plan, and a plan into momentum.

Lucy frames the work as building the engine – budget, sponsorship, ticketing, kit and stages – while protecting the founding intent: bring leaders together to create a brighter national vision through collaboration.

Crucially, she recognizes that Eden is not a simple backdrop. “Eden Project is not a conference centre,” she notes, yet that constraint becomes the point. In her words, “the beauty is bringing people together, in the rain forest being dripped on with birds running around their feet” to have big, big conversations”.

Anthropy operationalizes this ethos at scale through collaboration as a practice, not a slogan. The program is explicitly “crowd-sourced” and includes over 200 sessions, connecting over 2000 participants with 600+ speakers and 900 organisations – an architecture designed to reduce silos by design, not by wishful thinking.

Eden’s own framing emphasizes sessions that “break down barriers…cultivate feelings of hope and agency and facilitate collaborations on transformative ideas.”

Inside the organization, Lucy describes the shift from a near-volunteer build to a scaling team: “it’s still a Herculean effort, but there’s now 10 of us,” alongside “85 member organizations…about 2000 people”.

That internal growth mirrors Anthropy’s wider model: a year round membership network aimed at convening leaders to “collaborate, and create positive impact,” with alliances and member-only opportunities that keep partnership-building alive beyond March.

For attendees, the experience is curated to make collaboration easier.
And the Eden setting is part of the leadership lesson: a regenerated landscape. Once a former clay mine now hosting “one of the world’s largest indoor rainforests,” inviting visitors to feel, not just hear, what regeneration looks like.

Sponsorship and partnerships are acknowledged as part of the operating model and Lucy describes sponsorship as essential to making the gathering viable. If you believe Britain’s future is a shared responsibility, not a spectator
sport. Step into the Biomes, join the national conversation, and help turn collaboration into outcomes.