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Celebrating Community Action for Nature

Flourish wildflower meadow

This week marks a significant moment in The Wildlife Trust’s calendar as we celebrate and share stories of all the incredible communities that we have had the pleasure of working with over the past two and a half years of #TeamWilder.

With huge thanks to funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and expert training from the National Association of Community Organising, 2022 saw us wholeheartedly embracing a community organising approach by reaching out and listening to really understand Yorkshire’s urban communities. Working together, their ideas were turned into reality through growing knowledge, building skills and collaborating with partners to co-create wilder spaces on their doorsteps.

#TeamWilder puts people at the heart of nature’s recovery and since its launch our Community Engagement Team have supported around 60 community groups, local organisations, youth groups, places of worship and educational establishments to act for nature.

Sharing stories of these actions kickstarted a spectacular ripple effect as more and more people signed up to be a part of #TeamWilder.

Thank you to each and every one of you who has spent the last two and a half years digging, planting, sowing and building for wildlife – you are making an astounding contribution to nature’s recovery, and making a pretty awesome difference to people in your communities too!

Group of people stood next to a mural on a building, all leaning on the railings which overlooks a bedding area on a sunny day.

FoAK Group Photo with Park Mural

One such group is the Friends of Alderman Kneeshaw Park in Hull who have transformed their green space by involving local residents to shape plans, co-design, and improve their park for people and wildlife.

The power of partnerships has shone through in all they have done with local school children planting pollinator strips, young people from Child Dynamix creating a nature trail, and the group working collaboratively with Hull City Council to put wildlife at the heart of new planting in their park.

Their weekly allotment gardening sessions involve a committed group of regular volunteers, who are now sharing their learning and supporting other groups on their #TeamWilder journey.

group of children and a couple of adults digging long beds to plant bulbs in on a community park

FoAK community bulb planting day

View of a restored area for nature on a community park. High rise flats in the distance. The area is next to a path and is flourishing with wildflowers

FoAK - Restoration Island (after)

Welcome to English support refugees and asylum seekers in Hull and have incorporated nature into their weekly activities by working in partnership to take on stewardship of a community allotment where they actively create habitats for wildlife by planting and building for a variety of species including birds and insects.

They have done an incredible job of improving their local area for pollinators by creating a bench planter which they filled with perennials, and more recently built herb planters at a family workshop with Makerspace.

So many partnerships and collaborations have blossomed for Welcome to English and these have seen the group really making a difference across the city through activities such as planting native trees and bulbs.

Group of people having built a raised planter bed, filling and raking with compost

Welcome to English planter build

group of people crouched down next to a long area on a park that they are digging in preparation to plant thingss

Welcome to English - AK Park Partnership

2 young girls smiling and holding their handmade planter boxes up to the camera. They have plants in and the wooden boxes are painted in yellow and green.

Welcome to English - family planter-making event

Flourish, a Community Interest Group in Doncaster have worked with their volunteers to build bird boxes, planted a ‘sunshine garden’, created a stumpery to provide habitat for invertebrates, amphibians and small mammals, and planted a prairie strip with a mix of drought-tolerant, perennial flowering plants and grasses such as echinacea, rudbeckia, achillea, verbena and sedge to add a range of food for pollinators in an area of their site where there was none at all.

A stumpery that has been made for the benfit of wildlife. Logs and plants are dotted around a freshly-turned area of soil.

Flourish - completed stumpery

raised bed against a fence full of bedding plants for wildlife next to a path in the community

Flourish - prairie strip

The strip flowered well in its first year and looked so much better with the diverse mix of colours and textures of all the plants, attracting positive comments from site visitors – and it was definitely a hit with the local bees and butterflies too!
Liz, Flourish

Dene Road Residents Group created a wildflower meadow at the heart of their neighbourhood by scarifying and sowing yellow rattle seeds. They enhanced this area by planting bulbs to provide colour and pollen for early emerging bumblebees along with native saplings along the rear perimeter of the site which will develop into a hedgerow to increase food and shelter for birds and insects.

What has surprised me is how much people love nature – I think this is something we underestimate – I didn’t expect such a positive response to what we’ve been doing, and this encourages us that it is a real benefit to people as well as wildlife.
Claire, local resident and the driving force behind this work
Group of residentds all coming together to manage an area of grass to improve it for wildlife and the community

Dene Rd Residents Group - Community Work Party

an area of grass on a housing estate/residential street that is blooming with yellow rattle

Dene Road - yellow rattle

In short, #TeamWilder has created a constantly growing network of mutually supportive groups that are working both independently and collectively, to provide opportunities for people to access and act for nature in ways that are relevant and meaningful to them.

You can read the full stories of these groups in four new case studies published on our #TeamWilder webpage.

Read the case studies

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