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There is a grassroots environmental revolution going on across the UK that gets little or no recognition. We hear about examples individually – a project here, a green group there – but we rarely stitch together the full picture.
But a closer look at almost any small or large community, any city or village, reveals a multitude of people working on a local scale to make their homes and neighbourhood kinder, closer, and greener. There are projects to calm or eject traffic, projects to grow food and to plant flowers, projects which bring people together, where the stronger provide help and support for the more vulnerable. There are farms which have been set up by the local community, there are gardens planted on rubbish heaps, there are local harvests scattered across a street’s front gardens.
This may come as a surprise, if you’re not already involved in one of these groups. For the last few years, ever since the car-crash of international negotiation that was the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, most of us have fretted that little or no progress is being made environmentally, that progress is stalled. And on an international level that was certainly the case for a good few years.
But on a local level it has been a completely different story. While politicians have wrung their hands, or stuck their heads into the nearest sandbank, communities everywhere have said: “We’d better get on with it then.” And then they have. (It’s notable just how many of those groups started in or around 2009, the year of Copenhagen.)
Over the next month on Live Better we’re going to focus on 17 different groups around the country who are all carrying out work that is hair-raisingly inspiring. Each project, in its own way, is doing vital work out of sheer passion and dogged determination. Each has had a transformative effect on the community that has instigated it; over and over again we’ve heard about groups getting some wind in their sails and going on to dream larger and larger dreams, and then beginning to make those dreams reality. Over and over again we’ve heard people say: “We never imagined we could do this.” And yet they have.
We’ve picked these groups with the help of a long list of organisations who have put them forward; 10:10; FOE; Project Dirt; Neighbourly; UK Community Foundations; Groundwork; Business in the Community; Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens; the Prince’s Trust; Garden Organic; the Royal Horticultural Society; the RSPB; Keep Wales Tidy; The Wildlife Trusts; and Mind. Each organisation has sent us lots of suggestions, (and each has lobbied and enthused about the groups they work with). Over a couple of painful weeks we have narrowed several hundred down to just 17. We have picked groups that are lively and active in their own right, but also groups that will, taken altogether, make an attempt at representing the full breadth of grassroots activity across the country.
We’re dispatching writers to each of the 17 and profiling one, every weekday, for the next month – along with details about how you can help them, how you can find one in your own neighbourhood, or how you can set up something similar yourself. At the end of the month we’ll open up votes and you can pick your favourites. We will give the one with the most votes £1000, and the second and third £500 each (one voter will win £150 eco-vouchers in the process).
The groups we’ve chosen are all thriving, all inspiring in their own right. But best of all, there are countless hundreds more, just like them, all over the UK. We hope you will feel as inspired and cheered up by this lot as we do.
This article is part of the Live Better Community Project month. In September, we are showcasing 17 community projects from around the UK. On Wednesday 24 September, we will ask you to vote for your favourite project. The project with the most votes will be awarded £1,000 of funding, and two runners-up will each receive funding of £500. One voter chosen at random will receive £150 worth of gift vouchers for Nigel’s Eco Store. Terms and conditions here.
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