Getting your stakeholders and funders to understand the difference your work makes is essential to all community groups, charities and social enterprises so make the most of this free training.
Last week I circulated a link to a webinar that ran this Tuesday by the Aviva Community Fund in partnership with the FSI (Foundation for Social Improvement) about measuring your impact. If you couldn’t make that webinar you might be interested to know that it’s is being repeated in November and December. See dates and links below:
Cycling is a low impact aerobic exercise that offers a wealth of benefits. It also varies in intensity, making it suitable for all levels. You can cycle as a mode of transport, for casual activity, or as an intense, competitive endeavor.
Cycling is a wonderful workout that keeps you active. It can help shape a healthy lifestyle, both physically and mentally.
Continue reading to take a look at some of the ways cycling can enhance your fitness level and well-being.
There’s been a huge increase in interest in gardening and nature during lockdown – especially among young people who perhaps wouldn’t normally be associated with gardening. A third of a million Britons have visited the RHS website for advice, seed companies saw a 600% increase in sales and a recent poll showed that 7 in 10 of us think gardening has helped our mental health. Most young people, though, don’t have their own space for gardening, and often don’t feel it’s for them anyway, so how can they access and be part of the benefits a garden brings?
Tayshan Hayden-Smith, known as the Grenfell Guerrilla Gardener, founded the Grenfell Garden of Peace and set up Grow2Know, a community interest company which focuses on empowering young people through horticulture and creating a more inclusive environment. He doesn’t fit the normal profile of a gardener. He is young, of mixed heritage & is passionate about being a part of a more inclusive environment on the horticultural scene.
We are delighted to be running I Dig Trees for the sixth year during the 2020/2021 planting season with OVO Energy. This fantastic partnership programme goes from strength to strength and is a great opportunity for any community group or volunteer to join in, feel good and make a difference.
For climate. For wildlife. For communities – I Dig Trees!
Please note: Free trees are only available in mainland UK, not Northern Ireland.
Children are spending less time outside than ever before, affecting their health, wellbeing and love of the natural world. That’s why we’re proud to lead the Outdoor Classroom Day campaign, working with parents and educators to ensure kids get more time outdoors every day.
The movement to increase children’s access to nature involves community organisations too. Often working with children deprived of outside space, these organisations give children the opportunity to get their boots muddy and their hands in the dirt.
In the run-up to Outdoor Classroom Day on 5 November, we spoke to 4 community organisations in the Semble network about how they’re helping to get kids outside in a wild variety of ways and why they’re so passionate about it.
Walking improves health and cuts pollution but most cities still dominated by cars, says report
The world’s most walkable cities include London, Paris, Bogotá and Hong Kong, according to a report. The UK capital outranks almost 1,000 cities around the world on citizens’ proximity to car-free spaces, schools and healthcare, and the overall shortness of journeys.
Researchers at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) said making cities walkable was vital to improve health, cut climate-heating transport emissions and build stronger local communities and economies. However, they said very few cities overall gave pedestrians priority and were dominated by cars. The report found US cities ranked particularly low for walkability due to urban sprawl.
Among cities with more than 5 million inhabitants, only Bogotá in Colombia was in the top five for all three measures. The first measure assessed the proportion of people living within 100m of a car-free place, such as parks, pedestrianised streets and squares. These enhance health, boost community connections and increase pedestrian safety, the researchers said. Hong Kong took the top spot with 85% within 100m, with Moscow, Paris and London completing the top five.
This is why supporting outdoor play and outdoor learning is so important. It is not just the positive impact it can have on children, but also staff. The health and wellbeing of staff is key to delivering high quality childcare, and delivering #outdoorplay#outdoorlearning has a multitude of benefits. You can listen first hand to positive experiences, benefits and enthusiasm expressed by ELC practitioners in this short film – Enjoy Diarmaid LawlorMili Shuklatam baillieTheresa CaseyElaine CrichtonJohn Rafferty CMgr FCMILawson Foundation
If the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it’s how much we value our local parks and green spaces. All year round, an army of unsung dedicated parks staff and volunteers look after these treasured spaces, and tonight, landmarks across the country, including the White Cliffs of Dover, the London Stadium in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and Salford’s Media City, will be going green to celebrate this year’s Green Flag Award-winning parks and green spaces and to say a massive ‘thank you’ to the thousands of people who work tirelessly to give us some fantastic places to escape to.
As well as lighting up our well-loved landmarks green, we’ve also spoken to parks staff, volunteers, and members of the general public to find out why, this year more than ever, parks have held such a special place in our hearts. See the film in full below and feel free to share on your own social media channels.
We want as many organisations as possible to join us in saying thank you for our parks and green spaces. You can tweet your support for parks over the course of the week using the hashtag #GoGreenforParks and #GreenFlagAward2020 and remembering to tag the @GreenFlagAward and @KeepBritainTidy.
For a long time, I really couldn’t have cared less about plants or gardening. My mum loved to garden, but watering her tomatoes in summer was my least favourite chore. Even when I went to university and my sister gave me a Christmas cactus, I still wasn’t fussed — watering it with tea dregs (the scandal) whenever I remembered to. It wasn’t until I lived in, often very drab, rented homes in London that I started to understand why you’d go to all that effort to keep a green thing alive.
Fast forward to now and I’m a total plant-lover with a flat full of foliage and, for the first time ever, a (rented) bit of garden. But if like me, you love houseplants, follow planty accounts on Instagram, and are geeky enough to watch Gardeners’ World, you’ll know that much of what we see when it comes to plants and gardens is inescapably white.
“My plants have taught me so much about existing as you are, making sure your needs are met and learning from your failures”
I had an idea for something to help counteract this — what if I created a space just for women of colour to connect and share their love of all things green and leafy? Like a lot of my ideas, it was something I let buzz around in my brain for a while without doing anything about it.
That was until I happened to interview Matilda Eggere-Cooper, the founder of Fly Girl Collective, a running club for black women, and Addy Frederick, a founding member of the running club, for work. While chatting, Addy said one of the things she admired most about Matilda was the fact that when she spotted a problem or had an idea she didn’t just talk about it but actually did something.
Let me tell you, I felt shamed into action. Here I was, like so many times before, sitting on an idea, thinking and sometimes talking about it without actually doing anything. I decided this time things would be different. So, last year, I created a page on Instagram, designed a very basic logo with two of my favourite colours — pink and green — and Grown was born.
Grown was born out of a frustration yes, but also out of a desire to create, connect and honour. I’m interested in how plants can be a distraction from a world which poses challenges to our mental health, a means through which we can practice self-care and kindness to small living things and a place in which (unlike much of the rest of life) our successes and failures can feel comfortingly uncritical. Grown is a way to explore all of this. But there’s more to it than that.
Forgive me while I get metaphorical for a moment but, if you ask me, there are even personal lessons we can gain from looking after plants. They take up the space they need to survive, they move towards the light. They have strong boundaries – just try putting a plant in a space that doesn’t meet its requirements for growth: is it trying to flourish there anyway? No, it is not. My plants have taught me so much about existing as you are, making sure your needs are met (who hasn’t seen that “you’re basically a houseplant with more complicated emotions” meme?) and learning from your failures (RIP, maidenhair ferns).
“There are even personal lessons we can gain from looking after plants. They take up the space they need to survive, they move towards the light”
Beyond inspiration for how to thrive, for people of colour growing plants and flowers can be a way to reconnect or stay connected with their cultural heritage. In Birmingham, gardeners at the Uplands allotments grow the produce they know from home in the Caribbean and make seasonings from the herbs, onions and garlic they’ve raised on their plots. This inspired me to try and grow the marjoram, parsley and thyme needed to make Bajan seasoning in my own garden.
Nurturing plants that you recognise from home can be a living reminder of your roots. My grandmother recently told me she has so many Aloes in her house because they remind her of Barbados where they grow outdoors.
Research suggests interest in houseplants is booming among those born after 1980. There are lots of potential explanations: for a generation finding it harder and harder to get on the property ladder, houseplants can be a way to make a rented flat feel like home. With the climate crisis influencing more and more people to not have children, looking after plants can be an act of care that doesn’t require weighing up your parental instinct against the future of the planet.
And, I believe, as a woman of colour in the UK, having a bit of land in a garden or in a small pot in your room which gives you nourishment, of any kind, is an act of putting down roots and staking a claim that contains inherent power and optimism.
There have been women of colour doing amazing things in the world of plants and gardening for a while now, especially in London, where Grown is based. There’s Gynelle Leon, founder of London’s first cactus emporium Prick in Dalston, Jin Ahn, owner of Conservatory Archives in Hackney, and Franky Farra-Frond and Symara Templeman creators of L’Appartement in Peckham, to name but a few. And since creating Grown, I’ve happily become acquainted with more and more.
At the moment, Grown mainly consists of an Instagram page, a place where I share photos of my houseplant collection, flower-filled illustrations, indoor and outdoor gardening tips and other women of colour whose plant prowess I admire.
Thanks to the conversations and connections it sparks, running this project alone is incredibly rewarding – but I have bigger plans for Grown. One of the best things about plants and gardens, whether at allotments like The Uplands or in initiatives like May Project Gardens is the communities that spring up around them. So in the next few months, I’ll be launching events where plant-loving women of colour can meet, chat, swap plant care horror and success stories and make some new friends. I hope to see you there.
From passive solar heating to ‘sit spots’, author Richard Louv suggests three ways we can experience more nature in our daily lives
1. Choose a ‘sit spot’
Jon Young, one of the world’s preeminent nature educators, advises finding a special place in nature, whether it’s under a tree, the hidden bend of a river, or a rooftop garden. “Know it by day; know it by night, in the depth of winter, in the heat of summer,” he writes. “Know the birds that live there, know the trees they live in. Get to know these things as if they were your relatives.” They are.
2. Practise ‘friluftsliv’
‘Friluftsliv’ is a Norwegian term that roughly translates as ‘free air life’. It’s a lifestyle idea that promotes outdoor activity as being good for all aspects of human health. It’s pretty straightforward – just be outside as much as possible. Work it into your schedule by committing to being in nature for a minimum amount of time every day, or a certain number of days a month.
3. Design with nature in mind
Arrange your furniture in sync with the sun’s movements, so that sleeping and waking relate to the available light. If you’re designing a house, place large windows on south-facing walls for passive solar heating. Combine solar panels with skylights and use lights that adjust throughout the day via sensors.
Norfolk Green Care Network 