Building new worlds together.

At The Portal we’ve collectively been feeling the great exhaustion since 2023. 

So we decided to build a place you can run your business with integrity in the face of the polycrisis. Away from AI slop and hustle culture.

Black and white photo of a smiling woman with exposed shoulders and wearing a dress with thin straps, outdoors with a blurred background.
Black and white photo of a smiling woman with exposed shoulders and wearing a dress with thin straps, outdoors with a blurred background.

Hi, I’m Sally - the founder of The Portal. 

All this started when I left the corporate world where I had been designing and developing online learning using technology that transformed how people absorbed and retained knowledge. 

As I moved to consult with small businesses and service providers I saw brilliant people with important work struggling on platforms that forced them to compete in an endless cycle of content creation.

I also experienced the limitations firsthand when sitting alone with unwatched videos - there was no genuine connection or meaningful learning.

Fast forward to 2023 and it became clear we were facing interconnected crises that required interconnected solutions.

We knew both Experiencers and Creators would benefit from a supportive ecosystem that dismantled hierarchical learning experiences and instead created a digital learning neighbourhood to learn, share and grow together.

The Portal is a tool and platform that enables you to create digital offers that go beyond videos and PDFs, within a supportive ecosystem of others.

“Practically, The Portal is a great place to host courses and communities for non-extractive wellbeing professionals. Dive a little deeper, and I always exhale as I experience a place for exploring what is possible when we remember how to ‘be well together’ as a collective.”

Joanna Miller - Somatic Teacher, Mentor, and Trainee Elder

At the start of 2025 with our vision plotted out, we were gifted £15,000 from a community member that kickstarted the development of our platform. 

After further investments from community members and Creator subscriptions, we launched our Minimal Viable Product (a first build) in October 2025 and have been steadily growing since.

What we created now serves over 70 Creators and their businesses and over 2500 Experiencers.

“The Portal is a breath of fresh air. A thoughtful place to talk, create and collaborate. A place to support others and to feel supported. Being part of this unique community is pretty darn special.”

Clare Ashbrook - SEO Consultant

But we have a much bigger vision for you than this.

While we have been improving and enhancing whenever we can through bootstrapping, we have much bigger plans - plans that would allow for cross collaboration between Creators and Experiencer created learning playlists (think Spotify!) amongst many other things. 

And we don’t want to take any VC funding.

This isn’t about scaling for a billion dollar exit like those in Silicon Valley - we’re headed to a community ownership model where money made is put back into the platform and our amazing community that got it here.

“Here on The Portal, I find real people engaged in real work, keen to bring one another along. I love that it’s a labour of love in the spirit of mutual aid. In this era of desecration and horror, it’s definitely an island, a respite amongst the Shitification of It All.”

Tom Hirons - Poet, storyteller and poetry-teacher

At the time of writing that looks like growing our Creator numbers as well as opening up to the community for investment. You can follow that journey and become involved yourself by signing up to our newsletter and following us on Instagram.

I’m so proud of what we’ve built and can’t wait to explore what comes next together.

Thank you for all the support so far. 

Sally xx

Our values

To understand our values and the culture we are midwifing at The Portal, we’ve shared our community guidelines here - written by Portal Creator (and biggest fan) Keri Jarvis. 

They are grouped into People Care / Earth Care / Future Care to encompass the inspiration of Permaculture on The Portal.

To join our community (it’s completely free!), follow the steps in the video below.

    • We strive to embody the relational dynamics of liveable futures. This means that we meet one another with unconditional positive regard, practice making generous assumptions and aiming to engage with repair when ruptures occur.

    • We ask Creators to share their work with care for the nervous systems of our Experiencers. E.g, FOMO, false urgency and scarcity are not a cultural fit for the platform.

    • We offer tiered pricing models and encourage Creators to consider their capacities to support financial inclusion. We also invite Experiencers to engage with integrity in this endeavour to undermine Capitalist norms where we are incentivised to extract as much as we can from one another whilst giving as little as possible.

    • We know that many people who are active on The Portal have spent time in ‘women only’ spaces and maybe in the habit of speaking in those terms. The Portal is open to people of all genders, and we ask you to take care in referring to others with accurate pronouns, or as groups of ‘people’, rather than assuming gender.

    • Our orientation is towards social justice, and as such, we are opposed to all forms of racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, misogyny. We value the dignity of every member of our community.

    • We don’t knowingly use generative AI and avoid AI in general as much as we possibly can. The environmental & social impact is at odds with our regard for all life on the planet. We ask Creators to think carefully about their use of generative AI, and to avoid it where possible. We understand that there are some circumstances in which generative AI might feel necessary for people living with particular realities, and we will not be policing usage. We do ask that outputs of generative AI are marked as such for transparency.

    • We name the realities of the Climate Crisis and the violence that Capitalism inflicts on the planet. 

    • We deeply desire to host Creators who support people in tending to the Earth through their gardens, their political activism, or otherwise.

    • We invite you to fertilise relationships to support the future of people’s work- if you can share someone’s work with people who will appreciate it or make a meaningful introduction, please do it!

    • We don’t take money that doesn’t align with our values, and so the future of The Portal depends upon the support of our Creators. We ask that you become one, encourage others to consider becoming part of this ecology, and/ or support Creators’ work socially and financially in so much as you can.

    • We deeply desire to host Creators who support people in imagining & experimenting with tools and practices conducive to liveable futures.

The Portal is completely free to sign up to with lots of free offerings from our Creators, as well as paid offers. Our community is free to join too.


If you’d like to become a Creator, it’s £45 a month+ vat.

Join The Portal