Guidelines for setting up and running a Community Volunteer Weeding Group

Most councils across the country continue to use toxic herbicides (weed killers) to manage plant growth on our pavements, road verges and gutters. Local communities are coming together to take matters into their own hands in order to protect the health of residents and wildlife. If your local council gives you the option you can set up a volunteer weeding group and opt out of the council’s spraying regime.

Nick Tigg, a Town Councillor in Lewes, has worked through this process in his own community in order to opt out of East Sussex County Council’s highway management plans which included spraying weed killer in his neighbourhood each year. He has kindly written up some detailed guidelines below and hopes it inspires you to act where you live. These are his top tips!

1. Get an opt out scheme in place

Firstly, work out which council is responsible for managing the streets in your neighbourhood, for example this may be a town, parish, district, borough, city or county council. Despite my town having its own council and falling under a district council, it is actually the county council that maintains our streets. Luckily, an opt-out scheme was already in place (I can provide details of our scheme if you need them). If your council does not yet have a scheme in place, you will first need to get in touch with the relevant councillors to get this set up.

Negotiate with your Council

East Sussex County Council requested that 80% of the residents on our street sign on to opt out. We felt that this was too high and suggested it be changed to 60% instead – the council agreed. We also asked for an extended period of time in order to gather signatures and for some free green waste bins to be delivered, to which the council also agreed.

We learned that it’s worth negotiating with the council, question what they tell you if it’s not suitable and, if necessary, ask to see any policies that they have in place to back up their requests.

But why do you need an opt out scheme? Surely, if you just do the weeding there will be nothing to spray? Wrong, the spraying is likely outsourced to a large maintenance company with an amount of glyphosate that needs to be used up in order to satisfy the contract. If you want to be absolutely sure that spraying will not take place, you need an opt-out scheme in place.

2. Recruit volunteers

We found that you ideally need two ‘lead’ volunteers per street. These are the people who will be filling in forms, organising events and keeping track of progress. In addition, four to eight volunteer ‘weeders’ are generally needed per street (the length of your street will play a role here).

Start with the people you know. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a lead volunteer so try to find one other proactive person that you can share responsibilities with moving forward.

Think about how you’ll keep in touch with fellow volunteers. For example, is it worth setting up a dedicated Whatsapp group or will you keep an email list instead?

3. Knock on doors

More than 60% of residents had to agree to opt out of having glyphosate sprayed on our street. Collecting signatures is the most time-consuming bit of the whole exercise - but if you don’t do this bit right, you’re making trouble for yourself further down the line. If you want people to truly be on board and supportive of the scheme then the best start is to speak to your neighbours face-to-face.

You’ll need to go door-to-door with the sign-up form. With a big smile and a friendly voice, introduce yourself and tell them that you’re a neighbour. Don’t post leaflets, post on WhatsApp groups or have a public meeting yet as this creates an opportunity for complaints and arguments. Start with friendly, one-toone conversations.

I did this on my own, so it’s not impossible for one person to make this happen. But, if you already have a few keen volunteers then divide the street up between you.

My opening explanation looked something like this:

“The Council uses a glyphosate-based weed killer to get rid of growth on our pavements. It is effective at killing plants but our children and pets are exposed to it too and it can have negative effects on our bees and other insects. It also runs off the pavements into our streams and rivers. We have an opportunity to opt out of this regime but we need the majority of residents on the street to agree. The plan is to replace the spraying with a group of residents who are happy to volunteer a few times a year to pull up any weeds that may be causing accessibility issues. The council just sprays and leaves the weeds to die, they don’t clear them away. We plan to remove the plants properly so that wheelchairs, mobility chairs and buggies can pass easily. But we also want to be able to choose to leave some of the plants for pollinators when they are not in the way. I’m a beekeeper so the last thing I want to do is remove pollinating plants, but my brother is in a wheelchair, so I want to make sure that access is good. Is this something that you could support?

Only their house address, name and signature should be needed for the form, but once you have this information you could also try to recruit them as a volunteer. I suggest something along the following lines:

“Thanks for signing on. We already have some keen volunteers, but we welcome more. Could you volunteer for an hour now and then to join us for a bit of neighbourly weeding? It’s quite fun as you get to meet more of your neighbours and we have tea and cake at the end of it.”

If you do this when you are already going doorto-door it will save you time later. If they agree to volunteer, you can get their mobile number and/ or email address depending on the platform you’ve chosen for keeping in touch. Let them know that the amount of time they need to devote to weeding will be entirely optional, but we’ve generally found that once everyone is out together and having a good time, they tend to stay till the end anyway.

Once the door-to-door process was complete (I had to return to some addresses a number of times), we had about 90% of residents signed up. I then dropped off a letter at every house to explain the outcome of the voting, how many houses had been canvassed, how many responses had been received and next steps. Transparency is important so that no-one can argue with the results. I also included the contact details for the group, dates for weeding and another invitation to get involved.

Nevill Community Weeding Group.

4. Some practical stuff

For our communications, we set up a specific WhatsApp weeding group but I found calling people directly or arranging to meet in person works better for many things, so don’t rely entirely on WhatsApp. And never pass up an opportunity to recruit! Keep asking people to get involved and don’t forget to approach new people that have moved into the community.

Be careful with your messaging on Whatsapp groups, Facebook etc. We found that it works best not to mention pesticides too much and to instead frame your messages around access and keeping the streets neat and tidy. Keep it as light as possible as you don’t want to give people an opportunity to start arguing over the safety of glyphosate.

Make it fun

We wanted to make our weeding days a proper community activity that residents would enjoy being part of, so in the early days I invited volunteers to come back to mine for coffee and cake afterwards. We then decided to scale things up and poached and adapted a fantastic poster we had seen in Brighton which used the title ‘weed and feed’ (I can supply this if you want to see it) which we sent out on WhatsApp groups, posted on notice boards and leafleted through doors (this was the only time we leafleted).

Our first ‘weed and feed’ was huge with 80 people out weeding and others joining in as the day went on. We even managed to get the Mayor of Lewes along. Our next weeding event is going to be spread over a whole weekend, so we’re designating it as a festival of weeding called, of course… Weedstock!

General admin

There’s a certain amount of administration involved with signing up to an opt-out scheme. The council may give you the option to sign up to their insurance. We did, but we may not do that in future. Every volunteer has to watch a health and safety video and our council provided us with hi viz tabards, gloves, and safety specs (nobody wears the specs, but I’d recommend the hi viz: it says ‘we’re doing something official’).

Weeding guidelines

We ask everyone to take a fairly light touch with weeding. Don’t remove anything flowering (within reason) unless it’s causing an accessibility issue. If you’re keen to cut back any trees or shrubs coming over a wall, do ask the homeowner first. For clarity: the homeowner is required by law to stop anything growing onto or over a pathway, but only mention this as a last resort.

As a lead volunteer I state very clearly before we start weeding that everyone must ‘wear gloves, be careful on roads, look out for cars, don’t fall over, don’t kneel down if you can’t see what you’re kneeling on as there is often glass around on the floor’.

In terms of deciding a date for weeding, we ran a poll on our Whatsapp group which seemed to work pretty well, but you might not need it if you’re just doing one street, and you know everyone involved.

Note: We started with just opting our street out of spraying and had been running our group for about a year. Suddenly the whole estate got wind of this and wanted to join in and so the group expanded, at which point the WhatsApp group was really useful. It was a mammoth effort, but it was worth it - we now have about 80 people involved, all our streets are pesticide-free, and other initiatives have started to spring up as a result.

5. What next…?

We have now started helping older people on the estate to cut back their hedges if necessary. We also plan to take over some of the verges, which can make brilliant wildlife corridors and which the County Council have been mistreating terribly.

We are also moving slowly towards persuading everyone with a garden on the estate to leave a little section wild for wildlife - many people do this already, but if we can get the whole estate to do it we’ll be creating the most gigantic insect corridor with habitat for all kinds of critters. It’s a work in progress, but it could only have happened by establishing a motivated group who wanted to take back control of their neighbourhood.

Conclusions

For us, what started as a simple weeding group has now become a powerful community-building action that has brought people together and made them much more engaged with their local environment and with each other. It’s made many of us think ‘what else could we do?’. It’s a rebellion, one weed at a time - it stops people ‘othering’ their immediate neighbours and it begins to re-establish lost communities at exactly the moment we all need to come together to face the difficult times ahead.

People are scared of change and can fear doing something ‘different’ because they don’t want to stand out. Don’t assume it’s easy for people to get involved just because it seems like a simple task, you may need to do some hand-holding. It can help to walk someone around the street to explain how to weed, what should be removed, what can be left etc. Explain that plants on pavements aren’t just weeds, they can be excellent plants for pollinators and habitat for birds and other wildlife to forage in for food, especially when they are trying to feed their young.

The prize, if we build community action slowly, democratically, and transparently, is that we can hopefully build powerful movements for community engagement and local change.

Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions or need advice.

nicktigg@yahoo.com

Weeding the street