Changing Places Changing Lives

Places to go and places to play

We've been working with Play England recently (more below) - the organisation that campaigns for free, inclusive and local play provision and play space. Yesterday Play England together with the National Children's Bureau launched a new project, Places to Go, that aims to change policy to create more child-friendly neighbourhoods and take into account children's needs in transport policy. Not so much Safe Routes to School as Safe Routes to Everywhere. Children's needs often come pretty low behind the needs of, say, the motorist, so we welcome this project and the contribution it will make towards creating local environments that are better for children - and adults.

Which brings me to Groundwork Playscape - a garden for children that wowed the crowds at the RHS Tatton and Hampton Court shows. We all remember the places we played when we were kids - and often it had nothing to do with swings or slides but was focused on more natural environments. In recent years though, play seems to have become more sanitised and risk-averse. Playscape, supported by Play England, is about designing play areas that are inspired by more natural forms of play, incorporating acceptable levels of risk. The garden won gold medal and the BBC People's Award at Hampton Court and impressed plenty of visiting local authority types... so fingers crossed that Playscape will be a reality on an estate near you soon.

Local action for a global cause

World Environment Day rolled around again a few days ago - and Groundwork ran a series of events making practical local action happen on a number of sites around the region in co-operation with United Utilities.

In Warrington UU staff and Groundwork helped to progress the creation of a new community orchard - creating the framework necessary to train fruit trees. The orchard will be used for horticultural therapy and to encourage healthy eating.

Read more here.  We wish more businesses would learn that taking practical  action in the community is a much better teambuilding exercise than attending a corporate training centre for compulsory role play!

The waste challenge

A new report from Which? criticises many local councils for failing to provide adequate recycling doorstep collections and points out just how far we are behind other European countries with our recycling rates.

Making it as easy as possible for people to recycle their waste is really important - it needs to become a habit rather than a novelty - at work, at school and in the home. We're not sure though that just providing an efficient service on the doorstep will create that habit. Often more intensive approaches are needed to spread the recycling message around neighbourhoods.

When doorstep recycling first came to my street, an elderly neighbour was heard to say that "it's all a plot. They want to sack the bin men. It's all about putting people out of work". Conspiracy theories aside, many people still don't get why they should put the effort in. Recycling rates differ widely between different neighbourhoods in each local authority area.

Groundwork has been developing a number of approaches to encouraging recycling - by training community champions for example in Manchester. In Oldham, we're developing an initiative that will work with young people to encourage recycling amongst their peer group and families. Sometimes pressure from a neighbour of friend will work better than government or council exhortations.

Recycling kitchen waste is the next step forward - something we're already doing in Burnley as part of the Offshoots project. It's being developed as as a social enterprise with money used from commercial activities (such as collecting food waste from conference venues) subsidising the high cost of doorstep collections on some of Burnley's most disadvantaged estates.

Offshoots' fame spreads wider

Nice to see that Groundwork's Offshoots permaculture allotment initiative in Burnley has been featured in Treehugger - probably the world's leading internet site devoted to sustainability issues.

The food chain

On Thursday, we were visited by the Big Lottery Fund for the assessment of the regional Target: Well-being bid - which meant a visit to MERCi (Manchester Environmental Resource Centre) to hear a bit about some of the healthy eating-focused projects that the bid will fund if successful.

Groundwork's Allotments for Community Well-being will focus on regenerating two allotments - one in Wythenshawe and one in Gorton - using them as resources to encourage local people to get involved in food growing. Surplus food grown will be supplied to MERCi's Herbie initiative - which delivers fresh fruit and vegetables and education around healthy eating to food deserts in north and east Manchester.

HELF (Healthy Eating Local Food) will work with mental health service users, providing a variety of opportunities to get involved with food growing and cooking including the establishment of community cafes. People involved will also be referred to the Groundwork allotment project. The three projects are a great example of how independent initiatives can link together and make a bigger impact.

Fingers crossed that the friendly assessors from BIG were as impressed with the projects as we were. They certainly seemed impressed with the spread put on by Good Mood Food, a social enterprise that works with people with mental health needs and provides one of the best catering services in the city. Good Mood Food should also benefit from the produce grown on the food growing activities that Target: Well-being will fund.

Are charities making the most of the web?

On Wednesday, I attended the Third Sector Communications conference in London on behalf of Groundwork. Some excellent presentations from some of the country's cutting edge charity communicators - and fascinating to hear about the Woodland Trust's communications strategy which has seen them punch well above their weight in recent years.

Most interesting though, was Breast Cancer Care's Head of New Media, Bertie Bosrédon. Bertie has been transforming the charity's approach to the web by placing a new focus on users rather than the needs of individual silos of the organisation. He's also established new media as a unique discipline within the charity rather than a 'techie' department that simply uploads content. Breast Cancer Care has also begun engaging more with social networks such as MySpace and using tools such as Flickr with supporters. 

Clearly the larger charities are leading the way for those of us with smaller budgets (Bertie has a whole team of new media staff) - but there's plenty that charities and community groups can learn from them. Bertie is helping to set up NFP.org.uk - an online community for not-for-profit organisations to share news, knowledge and practical advice on using new media.  

Three days, three events...

Busy week for Groundwork's regional team with a series of events.

First up, on Tuesday, the North West Public Health Conference in Blackpool. We were particularly inspired by the workshop by Vincent O'Brien, Senior Lecturer in Public Health at St Martin's College which showcased some of his work in using participatory photography and video to explore the lives and health of people in settings varying from Kyrgyzstan to Salford. Of course, visual testimonies are much more powerful than dry evaluations - but Vincent also demonstrated how using video and photography helps to uncover information that would easily be missed through more traditional methods of consultation.

You can see some of the work and video at the Visible Voices website

Celebrating quarry heritage

The Rossendale Valley of Stone Heritage Landscape Partnership, a Groundwork-led group that aims to celebrate and conserve the rich quarry heritage of the area, has been awarded over £500,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

This is the largest grant that Groundwork has ever secured in Rossendale - and a fitting tribute to the 25 years of work of one of our first Trusts, which is shortly to become part of the new Groundwork Pennine Lancashire.

The contribution that Rossendale has made in providing stone products since the Industrial Revolution is not always well recognised locally - and the millions of people treading the sandstone flags of iconic areas such as Trafalgar Square have no idea that they are walking on a piece of Rossendale moor top.

The Valley of Stone project will be preserving features from the quarries and using these to tell the story of this important industry and the people who worked in it.

Do as we say, not as we do

Amusing vignette on the New Start blog that will be familiar to those who have attended public health-related conferences:

During the recent UK Public Health Association annual forum in Scotland, delegates were huffing and puffing as they hauled themselves up and down the stairs of the multi-storey Edinburgh International Conference Centre.

Many blamed this unplanned bout of exercise on the escalators having broken down as they navigated between sessions. But at the final meeting it was revealed that the moving staircases had in fact been deliberately switched off by event organisers as a gesture of solidarity following an outstanding speech [on obesity] given earlier that day.

It's always a slightly uncomfortable feeling when a speech about obesity reaches its crescendo - and the portlier members of the audience suck in their stomachs. If public health professionals themselves huff and puff when climbing stairs, how confident can we be that their target audience will bother to listen?

Organisations have to do more to practice what they preach - and that's just as relevant for carbon reduction as healthy lifestyles. All parts of Groundwork are working hard to reach the BS8555 environmental standard (some offices are further advanced). The controversy about the carbon impact of the forthcoming Live Earth concerts is an example of how the increased importance of climate change as a political issue is bound to bring increased scrutiny too, of those promoting a green message.

We'll outline some of the steps we've taken to improve the environmental impact of this office in a future blog post.

Last few miles for the Well-being marathon

We've been working non-stop on a hugely complex regional bid to the Big Lottery Fund - which explains why this blog has been quiet for the last few weeks.

Finally, Target: Well-being is all complete and submitted to BIG for assessment. It's been an absolutely mammoth task - the final bid is around 1000 pages long, with 91 individual projects and over 60 local delivery partners.

We're really excited about the prospect of the programme launching (fingers crossed) in the Autumn. It's a great opportunity to make a real difference to people's well-being in some of the most needy parts of the region - and it brings a whole load of different organisations together from the public health, environment, VCS and older people's sectors (and others). Groundwork has always been a great believer in breaking through silos and bringing different sectors together, and this programme has potential to deliver exciting work and new connections.

Some people have wondered why Groundwork has been leading a health-focused bid - but we think it's vital that more organisations are involved in tackling the determinants of health. And the linkages between health and the environment are clear. Target: Well-being includes a whole raft of projects that aim to increase cycling and walking - vital work in reducing dependence on the car. Another key outcome involves encouraging access to open spaces including some innovative initiatives from Landlife and the Lancashire Wildlife Trust as well as ourselves.

We hope to find out if we're successful in June. In the meantime, the stressed-out bid development team here at Groundwork Northwest have some well-being issues of our own to sort out!