2025 Campaign Launch
The Hidden Heroes Campaign launched in September 2025. As this was the first year, events and activities were centred around London, specifically the Borough of Richmond Upon Thames, where the campaign is headquartered. The events introduced the Evolving Doughnut Framework and how this framework can be used to help both citizens and change-makers understand the critical role fungal technologies can play in keeping us within planetary boundaries and achieving social foundations. We ran three face-to-face events and one online event, two of which included a health focus, and reached 140 people.
We are thankful to the Bingham Riverhouse club, Future Planet and Richmond Council for hosting these events, and to Alexandra Lea and Jason Scott for sharing their incredible knowledge about medicinal mushrooms. In addition to this, Richmond Council also awarded the campaign a micro-grant which has enabled the campaign to set up its digital efforts, including the creation of the Mycoverse and Global Fungi Calendar. We have curated 25 resources under the Mycoverse and listed 22 events on the Global Fungi Calendar. We hope to continue building our curation capabilities and become a recognised hub for citizens to access fungi-based resources and events.
To help citizens get involved and to achieve our mission to cure fungal blindness, we also set up and promoted various activities. These activities can continue to be accessed by citizens, and have been housed in the Mycoverse under the relevant fungal technology theme. These activities included:​​
The development of a fungal conservation campaign on the iNaturalis app. This allows citizens anywhere in the world to contribute to biodiversity science by uploading photos of fungi to the iNaturalist app. Social media assets and threatened species posters were also developed to enable citizens to promote conservation activities in their home, professional and study life.
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The development of a global mushroom-friendly restaurant list. The list is still quite short, however, we hope to continue adding to it as more citizens become aware of the campaign and tell us about mushroom-friendly restaurants in their area. We would also like to thank the Bingham Riverhouse restaurant, Shambles restaurant and wine bar and the White Horse pub for putting on extra mushroom dishes during the campaign launch so our local citizens could savour mycogastronomy.
Fungi and Sustainability Training
We worked with Adko to develop an online Fungi and Sustainability training. This training can be accessed by all citizens globally (in English). Adko, a sustainability and compliance training provider, kindly sponsored the training as they recognised the importance of fungi in achieving sustainable outcomes. In addition to being accessible to all global citizens, this training allows organisations to train their staff members, at no costs, and ensure a mycologically inclusive culture is fostered in their organisations.
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Growing Mushroom Team Building Events
The Caley Bros developed a corporate team building offering, which provides hands-on growing experience to spark conversation, teamwork and curiosity. By learning how fungi underpin healthy ecosystems, corporate teams and are able to gain a fresh perspective on sustainability and regenerative practices they can apply in their work. After the team building event, participants are able to take away their own growing kits and new insights to share back at home and work.
What's coming next
Our final activity was a fungi photography competition. This is still taking place, and we hope to be able to share the winner, honourable mentions and photos shortly. This activity took place as part of our launch efforts and was extended owing to the fungi season kicking off late this year.
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We are also in the process of developing the resources and podcast for organisational change-makers and will be able to share these shortly.
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