Wellbeing from purposeful outdoor activity

The Conservation Volunteers connect people and green spaces to deliver lasting outcomes for both. They’ve received a number of grants from Leeds Community Foundation over the years, including a recent Ideas that Change Lives grant to develop a social enterprise around woodwork, gardening and crafting sessions at Hollybush.

 

Can you tell us a bit about The Conservation Volunteers? 

The Conservation Volunteers charity runs two community and environmental hubs in Leeds – Skelton Grange Environment Centre (Hunslet) and Hollybush Conservation Centre (Kirkstall) – as well as working in schools, parks, and other public spaces across the city.  

TCV works in the heart of communities where people live, work, and go to school, particularly in areas experiencing highest levels of need, and help to connect people with nature and with each other.

TCV responds to the combined crises of climate, biodiversity, and public health (social isolation, poor mental health, obesity etc). TCV’s activities seek to connect people to greenspaces through direct encounters with wildlife, positive experiences of using open spaces and practical conservation activities. TCV programmes benefit the health and prospects of the participants whilst protecting or enhancing greenspaces and helping restore biodiversity for the benefit of the wider community.  

 

What did your Ideas that Change Lives grant enable you to do? 

TCV has been fortunate to receive three grants from the Ideas that Change Lives fund over the last decade. The first helped us establish our community café, which continues to run successfully and provide opportunities for adults with learning disability. The second supported our experiment with Sunday opening in 2020-22 to enable a wider range of local people connect with and enjoy walks in the Hollybush gardens, volunteer, share skills and connect with others. 

The third grant has supported the building of income and activity around the café and shop: 

• • • • A more commercial approach to the sale of woodwork, craft and plant items produced by our participants to invest in our charitable work 
      • The development of several monthly Sunday activity strands as TCV builds an audience and profile
      • Practical courses, health and wellbeing sessions, public events 
      • Building a pool of volunteers who help deliver the above programme 

Revenue is important for sustainability, however under pinning everything is TCV Hollybush as an inclusive and accepting, purposeful respite and recovery space for people in need of support. 

 

Can you tell us about the impact of what you do on the people you work with? 

In the last year TCV Hollybush delivered almost 10,000 workdays connecting people and green spaces across Leeds. We worked with around 500 people, with 150 doing 10 sessions or more and of whom 50 participate weekly or more and 30 have been involved with Hollybush for more than 5 years, notably adults with learning disabilities and people with enduring mental ill health., of these 40% live in the lower 20% of neighbourhoods. 

Our evaluations show that there is positive impact on mental and physical health. Consistent, ongoing activities can be relied on by people with fluctuating, persistent or recurring mental illness.  The ethos of the Centre is that people feel they come to “work” and that they can define themselves by the contribution they make to society and not their condition. We are humbled by stories from our participants telling us that they do not believe that they would be alive if they had not found us, or that through their time with us they are finally able to manage their health without heavy doses of medications. Others have reported that eating healthier food at our projects has meant they now buy better choices and are eating better. 

 

What are some of the biggest challenges you face as an organisation? 

Operating two amazing and much-loved large buildings and nature areas means that TCV Leeds has substantial fixed costs, and this requires a significant programme of activities delivery to generate the revenue to cover this. As with many community organisations TCV has seen the need for our services escalate and intensify, whilst income from local authority grants and contracts decrease in real terms at the same time as competition for other funds is increasingly fierce.  

The delivery has to evolve but remain within the capacity of the team, it can take a lot more effort to implement four £5000 projects than one £20k project, even if they are superficially the same. 

 

How is your organisation preparing for the future, and what kind of funding is needed? 

TCV is working hard to improve the systems that can take up staff time we would prefer to focus on front line delivery and also to generate more unrestricted, flexible income. In Leeds we continue to evolve our delivery to meet the needs of our core marginalised client group, but also seek to generate enterprise income that can support essential services. We are hoping to do this in a way that allows fully integrated settings and retain the ethos of Hollybush and Skelton.  

We have invested a great deal in our sites to provide more spaces for activity and to ensure they are accessible, although there is work to do at Hollybush where a lift to all floors and a redevelopment of the barn are on the wish list.