Project update- Richard Vaughan the Head of Environment at Herefordshire Council, leading the Sustainability & Climate Change team and Steph Allen Cultural Development Lead for Herefordshire have asked to be involved with New Leaf to co-produce the end of project seminar/conference co-produced with our participants from across the region in June 2027.

The recent Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Transformative Change assessment highlighted the need for positive visions of a better future for nature and people to inspire transformative change – shifting views, structures, and practices to address the underlying causes of the environmental crisis.

We have two choices, we can ignore the earth crisis or we can ask the question how can we help?

The fundamental ideas and questions of the Seeded Wing is an exploration of how do we develop a compassionate response to climate change through the uplifting creative health effect of nature connectivity. The Seeded Wing links social and environmental justice, so that a nature placed creative health co-production with marginalized groups of young people, becomes a form of climate response. The questions are: Will this give us more energy to understand what our individual contribution might be and take action?Will creative health nature connection mitigate the negative effects of eco anxiety burn out? And can this create nature connectivity help us find ways of living with nature instead of against it and with eachother instead of being in a state of separation?

Example’s of artworks:

New Leaf artists Jaime Jackson and Pearl Colette co-produced animation comic/zine. The ACE funding will will use this process, to work with three different groups of young people & children, to co-create a story inspired by the climate & wellbeing subjects in The Seeded Wing. Followed by illustrating the story via painting & bringing it together in moving image animation, made using iPads, & creating a comic:

Based on the WASH project’s Nature’s New Journey zine created by New Leaf & Thornton School. Natures New Journey was planned, written and drawn by Haider, Areebah, Husna, Fahad, Zaki, Jamaal and Amaan, Year 6, in an after school eco art club at Thornton Primary School, Birmingham UK.

The Seeded Wing artist Dr Sally Payen MA RCA PhD artworks:

Jaime Jackson Commissioned Seeded Wing visual and digital artist:

Evaluation:

This project will be part of the Impact & Insight Toolkit run by Counting What Counts. We are partners working with work with Counting What Counts, Culture Counts and Arts Council England, to provide evaluation tools to ACE funded organisations. This evaluation approach has been designed to provide value to New Leaf as an organisation first and foremost. This means having the tools to set our own definitions of success by describing our ambitions, and then the ability to measure our progress against our ambitions. This can be achieved using feedback collected from the people who experience our work. The feedback is collected and can be analysed using an online evaluation platform called Culture Counts. Through doing this, we can use evaluation to help inform our own decisions and be well-equipped with data-driven evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of our work to you.

Strategic links:

Dissemination will be supported by Sustainability West Midlands (SWM). SWM are a membership organisation established for over 24 years of which Herefordshire New Leaf, Birmingham Botanical Gardens, and West Midlands Combined Authority are members. Their 200+ membership includes numerous organisations focussed on improving nature, on supporting young people across the West Midlands area, and on the power of the arts and culture and at the local level. We will work with SWM to engage with their community of cross-sector stakeholders in relation to the project thus increasing impact.

Anna Bright Chief Executive Sustainability West Midlands

Our project supports the West Midlands Combined Authority’s Environment Behavior Change Plan

Birmingham’s City of Nature Plan | Birmingham’s City of Nature plan | Birmingham City Council

Through our project partnership with Birmingham City Council our project will support the delivery of Birmingham’s City of Nature plan was approved by Cabinet in 2022. Birmingham as a City of Nature will be:

• A Green City – Net Zero ambitions are fulfilled, with sustainable, inclusive, safe, and resilient development.
• A Healthy City – Encouraging active movement, easy access to nature, and fostering community gardening, with a goal of at least one community garden in every ward.
• A Fair City – Improving equal access to green spaces through the Birmingham Future Park Standard and equipping citizens with skills for future green jobs.
• An Involved City – Empowering Green Champions, educating children about nature, and fostering community ownership of green spaces through nature-focused activities.
• A Valued City – Implementing a sustainable finance framework and a circular economy model to ensure long-term funding for the City’s blue and green spaces while highlighting their benefits.

Over the 25-year City of Nature delivery plan, we aim to increase publicly accessible greenspaces from 600 to 1,000. The Birmingham Future Parks Standard will apply to all parks, and for the first five years (2022–2027), we are prioritising efforts in six wards with the greatest need for environmental justice: Balsall Heath West, Bordesley & Highgate, Nechells, Gravelly Hill, Pype Hayes, and Castle Vale.

And WMCA’s Nature Recovery Strategy

The West Midlands Combined Authority has an ambitious environment
programme, which covers four thematic areas. Successful delivery will
depend on several factors, including policy, regulation, standards and
investment. It will also rely on taking people and communities on the
journey with us. Delivering a better environment for the region depends
on substantial social and behavioural changes, and that the right
conditions are created for those changes to be both easy and possible.
The Environment Behaviour Change Plan will focus on the four areas
of the environment programme, which works alongside WMCA’s net
zero agenda, to create a better environment and tackle climate change.
Each programme theme has its own strategy or plan that provides the
evidence to inform WMCA’s priorities for delivery.

Natural Environment – The Natural Environment Plan set out our
vision for protecting, restoring, and enhancing our region’s natural
environment. Our Community Green Grants programme funded 23
projects to improve access and create greenspaces. We have been
appointed as the Responsible Authority for a Local Nature Recovery
Strategy (LNRS), which is an evidence-driven spatial plan for nature
recovery and natural environment outcomes for the region. Through
the West Midlands Forest Partnership, we are working to improve tree
cover, by commissioning an i-tree survey to assess regional tree stock
and a tree nursery for growing trees locally.

As well as the new Herefordshire Cultural strategy created by the Herefordshire Cultural Partnership and Herefordshire Local Nature Recovery Strategy

Climate, eco anxiety and nature connectivity research:

The Seeded Wing project research associates ground and inform our art practice in interdisciplinary knowledge which includes:

Professor Peter KraftlIn at Loughborough University . Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and awarded the prestigious Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Murchison Award for his longstanding work on geographies of childhood and education. In 2022 he was conferred as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, in recognition of his research about children, young people and urban design/planning From 2022-2026, Peter was an Executive Member for the £35 million NIHR School for Public Health Research. He was also the national Children, Young People & Families Programme co-lead, responsible for commissioning and delivering over £3 million of funding across 10 projects.2022 he was conferred as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, in recognition of his research about children, young people and urban design/planning From 2022-2026, Peter was an Executive Member for the £35 million NIHR School for Public Health Research. He was also the national Children, Young People & Families Programme co-lead, responsible for commissioning and delivering over £3 million of funding across 10 projects.

Dr Gareth Morgan , University of Leicester. A Chartered Clinical Psychologist and one of the clinical tutors on the University’s Clinical Psychology training programme. He works part time as Youth Lead for the Climate Psychology Alliance and am co-chair of the Association of Clinical Psychologists’ Climate Action NetworkClimate Psychology Alliance. A diverse community of therapeutic practitioners, thinkers, researchers, artists and others who believe that attending to the psychology and emotions of the climate and ecological crisis is at the heart of their work.

And Inner Climate Response Alliance a new partnership made up of the Mindfulness Initiative, the Climate Psychology Alliance and Climate Majority Project.