“There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.” Margaret Wheatley
I'm sure we are all aware that we are facing a nature and climate crisis. I'm also sure that we've all heard about large-scale environmental projects, such as those that are restoring habitats or bringing back native animals like beavers. But are we aware of the importance of local greenspaces and neighbourhoods as places to nurture nature?
Grassroots community action can protect and improve our community spaces for nature and people. Being part of community action also helps us to feel more optimistic about tackling the big issues and provides us with an opportunity to improve our wellbeing through meeting our neighbours and making where we live better for everybody.
This doesn’t all happen by itself and it needs local leaders and supportive organisations to encourage and help people with common interests and concerns to link up to do something.
For us at the Trust this all starts with listening, particularly to those people and groups who are labelled as ‘hard to reach’. We prefer to say that these are groups who are ‘easy to ignore’ and we have a team of people whose job it is to discover the strengths in those communities as well as the challenges they face.