Growing communities through nature: research report

Abstract

Growing Communities Through Nature was designed to test models for community engagement in co-production and local innovation, following this up with co-designed and co-delivered maintenance, monitoring and evaluation activity. The research team investigated the impact of using three different institutional vehicles for bringing together communities around local activity. The project worked in three Cornish towns - Launceston, Helston and Newquay - to run workshops co-designing public open spaces in collaboration with a number of partners. The workshops aimed to bring people together to share ideas about an existing space and its potential improvement, discuss new designs for the site and how to maintain the space, as well as monitoring and evaluating its impact on biodiversity and the local community. In addition to the benefits of climate change mitigation, the development of deeper working relationships between the University, partner organisations and the public provides a blueprint for further integration between higher education institutions and communities. Experience of using co-design, co-delivery and co-monitoring methods and tools provides a foundation from which the partners can develop future place-based activities to respond to a range of needs and challenges (such as community development and housing schemes). This approach could also be scaled-up to other Cornish towns and villages via larger collaborative funding applications. This research report documents the project, peoples’ experiences and the wider implications.