The Vision
The City of Nature Alliance is the way organisations in Birmingham are coming together to help achieve the the aims in the City of Nature Plan. All the members of the Alliance already deliver actions that relate to the City of Nature Plan. That could mean connecting more people with their parks and green spaces, reducing social isolation or providing eco-therapy through social prescribing. It could be caring for wildlife, increasing biodiversity and nature recovery. It includes tackling climate change and promoting active travel. Working with children and young people. Offering a range of healthy activities, helping people to grow food or garden. Or joining or running a Friends Group. Members are both hyper local and national delivering on the ground and helping to shape stratergy for the city. The list is as long as the City of Nature Plan and even longer as new ideas and projects are developing all the time.
The Alliance also works with a large and growing community of passionate “Green Champions”, and strives to ensure that all people are able to discover their own personal connections to parks and green spaces as places to meet, play, learn, grow, breathe, and enjoy nature – together. Because together they don’t just represent where Birmingham has been – they inspire us to see how we go forward”
The story
We realised early in Future Parks Accelerator (FPA) project that the things we needed to achieve to even start to create a 25 year plan, was going take a whole lot of people working together bringing with them all their knowledge, experience, skills, tools, concerns, hopes and belief.
The FPA project was always going to be about more than affording the ongoing maintenance of parks, we looked at housing (where we live), health (and our wellbeing), children (and their education) and employment (green jobs and skills) and how those things were connected to each other and to our green infrastructure.
But we soon realised that it isn’t just some things that are connected, everything is connected. We know that we rely on the natural world for everything we need and we are part of the natural world. So really we could say there is no natural and unnatural world, there is only the world, the planet we live on – Earth.
No matter what scale we look at it, our home, our street, our neighbourhood, our ward. our country, we are still all on one planet, all needing the same things not just to survive but also to thrive. So if understanding nature and protecting is at the heart of everything, we needed to put nature at the heart of our work and if we could build an Alliance with nature at it’s hearth, could we together build a city where nature is at it’s heart – a City of Nature.
So that’s what we set out to do. We thought about what a City of Nature would be. It should be a fair city facing and delivering environmental justice, a green city tackling climate change and the impacts of climate change, stopping the decline of biodiversity and increasing it’s canopy of trees, it needed to be an involved city where everyone had the opportunity to help design, care for and use green spaces, a healthy city with places to increase physical and mental wellbeing and a valued city, where people understand the worth of green spaces and help identify the funding needed to provide it. From this we started to create the mechanism of the Alliance and the why and what quickly became the how and who, when and where.
How was going to be about listening, understanding, appreciating, collaborating, delivering and celebrating.
Asking who? led us to the proposition of the involvement of all individuals, communities, groups, departments and organisations. From the micro hyper local level to the macro city wide strategic level and everyone in between talking together and working together.
So we piloted the “stronger together” collaborative model of a formal Birmingham City of Nature Alliance through a project that was delivered in five parks in Bordesley and Highgate Ward: The Bordesley and Highgate City of Nature Pilot
Where we are now
The City of Nature Alliance is growing all the time but current has the following regular members:
Birmingham Open Spaces Forum (BOSF)
Birmingham & Black Country Wildlife Trust
Birmingham Treepeople
The Active Wellbeing Society (TAWS)
Legacy WM
Patchwork Meadow
Learning Journey
Community Environmental Trust
Ecobirmingham
The Parakeet Studio CIC
The Canals and River Trust
RSPB
The National Trust
Natural England
We meet online via Teams once a month and are currently working together to deliver the Urban Nature Development and Urban Forest Accelerator Projects funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Commonwealth Games Legacy Funding and Community Infrastructure Levy funding for infrastructure improvements. All though the individual Alliance members work citywide the focus for our collaborative work is on the 6 priority Red Wards (Environmental Justice Map)
Bordesley & Highgate
Balsall Heath West
Castle Vale
Gravelly Hill
Nechells
Pype Hayes
If you are interested in finding out more or would like to find out about joining the City of Nature Alliance please contact us:
Naturally Birmingham Future Parks Project 