Backyard Nature

Towards the end of last year, we introduced the Backyard Nature (BYN) Guardians project to children and young people at Beechwood Village and Laindon in Essex. The project aims to bring young people closer to nature and encourages them to find out how nature works.

The project delivered two events last year at Beechwood: a Community Garden SOS day in September and a bulb planting session in December, which jointly attracted 46 participants.

In Laindon, several Backyard Nature Guardians have been recruited and have recently been building bird boxes, which have been sited at various locations across the Church View estate.

Our involvement with Backyard Nature opened a door to a wider consortium of housing associations and through working collaboratively, Swan was able to secure a grant from the I-Will Fund for the sum of £120,000 to deliver further activities connecting children to nature.

Food preservation workshops

One such initiative was the establishment of a Green Youth Board, a platform for young people to share their voices on issues such as climate change, conservation, protecting wildlife environments and other environmental issues.

Two children who attended the Community Garden SOS day, Antony and Alicia, were so keen to get involved that they became representatives on the National Green Youth Board. Antony and Alicia have travelled to London and Liverpool as the voice for Swan customers.

Backyard Nature is being rolled out to residents of the Exmouth Estate following a successful funding application to the Mayor of London’s ‘Grow Back Greener’ Fund, from which £35,500 was secured to undertake green projects. Residents will be supported to grow their own food and to undertake planting and nature activities during the coming year.

Helping customers do their bit to love the planet, our Customer Involvement and Community Development (CICD) team has been hosting food preservation workshops at The Reach Community Hub on its Blackwall Reach development in East London.

Having attended several ‘Preservation Culture’ workshops, which showed people how to turn leftover fruit and vegetables into delicious jams, pickles and chutneys, three residents were trained up to deliver the workshops themselves, as volunteers.

The group went on to deliver three workshops in August 2021 and in February and March 2022.

These workshops bring people together to develop new skills and make great use of leftover food at a time when household budgets are tight.