Webinar: Learning from Esmée’s Blue Spaces programme

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This page has the transcript of the Learning from Esmée’s Blue Spaces programme held on 11 December.

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Panellists and presenters:

Welcome and Introductions

Simon Wightman:

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to this Blue Spaces webinar. Really pleased so many of you can join us today, really looking forward to an interesting session. My name's Simon Wightman, I'm a funding manager at Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. I'm here with Jenny Wheeldon, Hal Rhodes, Iwan Edwards, Thalia Papanicolaou, and Ines Hart.

We're going to spend the next hour or so talking about the Blue Spaces program. We'll hear from a couple of the projects, as well as from the Involving Young People Collective, who helped us with it. And we'll be sharing some of the learning that's come up through the program. And there'll be plenty of time at the end of the session for questions.

For accessibility, we have closed captions available. We have a translator from Cymen who will, translate any Welsh spoken to, to English. My audio description is I'm a tall, middle-aged white man with brown, although increasingly grey, hair, curly hair and glasses. If I can ask the panel to introduce themselves and to give a short description, that'd be great.

Jenny… Oh, Jenny, you're on mute.

Jenny Wheeldon:

That's a great start, isn't it? I am slightly less smiley than I was 2 seconds ago. Small, curly-haired, white woman sitting in my spare bedroom here, and I'm now going to pass over to, Iwan Edwards.

Iwan Edwards:

I, I'm Iwan, tall, white male, longish brown hair, blue eyes, and today I'm wearing a fairly colourful blue jacket.

I'll pass on to Hal.

Hal Rhoades:

Hi everyone, I'm Hal Rhodes, also tall, also white, but completely bald and I wear a pair of light-coloured glasses and silver earrings.

And I'll pass on to Ines.

Ines Hart:

Hi everyone, I'm Ines, I'm from IYPC. I am a white female with brown curly hair and wearing a blue jumper. I’ll pass to Thalia.

Thalia Papanicolaou:

Hi everyone, I'm Thalia, I work for Huddle, and I'm also from the IYPC. I'm a short, mixed-race woman with braids. Currently, I'm wearing, glasses with a tint.

Simon Wightman:

Cool. Just a few, practicalities before we kick off proper. Live captioning is available for the session, and there's a link in the chat if you'd like to see the captions in a separate window. But you can also click the closed captions button, at the bottom of the window to see them within the Zoom.

We have a Welsh translator, Gairmon, and anyone who needs to use that, please go to the bottom toolbar and select interpretation and English. You can do that now, and then translation will come in automatically whenever anybody is speaking Welsh on the webinar.

I'd encourage you to post questions at any point using the question and answer facility at the bottom toolbar. Please vote for questions submitted by other participants if you want to make sure that we get round to that on the call at the end, and you can do that by clicking the thumbs-up icon next to the question.

We've got Liam and Luna typing responses to questions in the Q&A, and we'll try and answer as many as we can, and we'll prioritise those that get upvoted, so do vote for your favourites. If there are any questions that we miss, we will answer them afterwards and post that with the rest of the material on the website.

There's a lot to cover today. Don't worry if you miss anything. We will be recording the webinar, and we'll be sharing the transcript with those additional questions.

Background and Overview of the Blue Spaces Programme

Simon Wightman:

So, just before we kick off, many of you will be familiar with Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, but we're a charitable funder. Last year, we provided just under £50 million in grant funding across all of our aims. We have a £60 million recycling facility to support social investment and we support work across the UK that contributes to three aims. Those are improving the natural world, supporting creative, confident communities where people drive the change that they want to see, and addressing social injustice. You can find out more about the work we support on our website, so I won't go into too much detail now.

But one of the priorities under the Our Natural World aim is freshwater, and we support some fantastic organisations working across that priority - all working really hard to ensure that the huge number of threats facing the freshwater environment are understood and are acted on by decision makers. So that we can see a future in which freshwater habitats and species that depend on them are better served by the decisions we make and the way that we manage land and resources.

In many ways, it's an exciting time. I can't remember a time where freshwater has been so far up the political agenda and in the media on an almost daily basis. And we were reflecting within Esmée that much of that is down to communities, to people who really care about their local waters, and have said enough is enough, and they've realised the power that they have to push for change.

Recognising this importance in place-based work, not only improving the local environment, but in supporting advocacy through demonstrating a better way of doing things.

We began the Blue Spaces programme in September 2022 to find ways to support communities to take action to improve local freshwater. Today, we're going to share some of the learning of that journey and report on the focuses of the programme development, and the progress it's made in meeting its objectives so far.

We'll bring together some of the learning from the funding process, and we'll also have time to highlight some of the brilliant work that's been done through the Place Based Freshwater Initiatives that we're supporting.

By sharing this learning, we hope to demonstrate the impact of partnership and community to improve freshwater for people and nature. We're excited about continuing to learn from this work, and using it to inform the wider ways that we, that we work within Esmée Fairbairn. But we also hope it's useful to other funders, to statutory organisations, to environmental NGOs, and to community groups.

So, Jenny's going to spend the next 10-15 minutes setting out Blue Space's programme, what we've done so far. We'll then have about 20 minutes to hear from a couple of the projects, and from some of our Involving Young People Collective (IYPC) consultants. We'll then explore some of the learning for 15 minutes, and we'll end up with a question and answer session.

So, without further ado, I'm going to pass over to Jenny.

Jenny Wheeldon:

Thanks very much, Simon. I'm very much hoping that you can all see a slide there. Yeah, great, that's a good start, isn't it? Just get myself organised. Great. Yeah, so as Simon said, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation has a focus and priority around freshwater, and just as a wee bit of extra context, we know now that freshwater issues are far much better understood by the public, and scientifically, and the pressures upon them. And yet, there's still quite a niche interest in terms of the amount of funding that goes towards freshwater. And that's one of the many reasons that the foundation decided to focus on some freshwaters in our Blue Spaces programme. And that programme is really about trying to help support local communities take action around freshwater, which speaks to our priorities on freshwater, working at scale, and with communities working together for change.

Programme Design and Implementation

Jenny Wheeldon:

So, in terms of when we were starting to think about developing the programme, this diagram here just shows you the kind of aims that we had for our work around freshwater with communities. And these areas were things around, obviously, looking at work that would restore freshwater habitats, but look at new and novel ways to do that, particularly trying to ensure that people whose voices were underrepresented in conversations around environment and taking action on the environment were present.

And we really used these sort of principles of what we were looking for to shape our programme and the criteria that we used when looking for projects that we would support. Particularly looking for things that engaged with and were shaped by diverse communities in a place, new and unusual collaborations and partnerships, engaging with local communities, and benefiting people in place.

We're also looking at things that might bring in alternative types of funding, and that would demonstrate models that could be scaled up more widely across the UK.

So, a very quick overview of the work that we have supported, then, since we started working on the Blue Spaces programme in 2022. So you can see here, the overall programme we've got up and running is approximately £4 million, and a large amount of that is in a number of a smallish number of large grants. But we also have a large number of what we call development grants, which are smaller grants over short term, which are really to support organisations to develop their ideas and put together partnerships, and to give people space to create, and also space to try things and say, well, actually, that's not a go for the longer term.

And we did that because that's really often the missing link in the kind of funding that is available for working in the freshwater sector. So, the programme is quite different in terms of the distribution across the UK. This just shows you what we did in the different parts of the UK in order to develop the programme.

So, in Wales, we launched a specific chord where we asked people to come to us with ideas for projects in Wales. And it's partly because there's no existing formal setup for catchment working in Wales. And also, you have the Future Generations Act, which really tries to embed the fact that communities and younger people should be embedded in action on the environment. So, we felt there was a really good opportunity in Wales and also to work at a scale that was manageable, to put out a proactive call for projects, which is not something that we normally ever do.

When it came to Northern Ireland, the focus there has been on building capacity in the sector. There are very few organisations still involved in catchment working in Northern Ireland, and what we found was what was really needed was to build up capacity and better link together people in freshwater working. So, our work there has been more around supporting the, the sector and the Northern Ireland Environment Link to bring the freshwater organisations together.

And then in England and Scotland, it's a very complicated picture already, loads of organisations already involved in the catchment-based approach and the like. So, when it came to England and Scotland, our normal grant funding stream remained open, and things that came in through that that suited the Blue Spaces criteria, we then made part of the overall cohort.

So, the kind of work that we have supported, if you think about, you know, what our drivers were for putting in place the Freshwater programme, was to look for projects that delivered across all of these different things that you see here. And the projects that we've got really do, cover the entire range of things that we were hoping that we'd be able to support.

Particularly, perhaps unusually in there, we've got quite a lot of arts and creativity elements in the program, and that's something we'll hear about a wee bit more. But it just gives a flavour for the kind of mixture of things that the projects are all working on. None of them, all things everywhere, all at once, but across the range, we're working on these elements. And one of the things we wanted to do was to get a broader mixture of people and partnerships working together. And, the diagram here shows, you know, quite a few of the usual suspects, the catchment management type river trusts, the nature protection-type orgs, like Wildlife Trust. But again, we've got quite a lot of arts and creativity in there. We've got, private industry, we've got community energy and land management. We've also got some coastal organisations. So, a slightly different mixture than we had previously seen working on freshwater.

And 11 of these organisations we had never previously funded, which, was again something that we're very keen to reach, sort of, new, organisations that we haven't had a previous relationship with.

So, here you can see, just a little spread, illustration of the spread of the projects that are working on blue spaces and with communities around, around and about. So, those shown in green there came in through our usual funding stream, but we sort of looked at them in the blue spaces criteria with that lens. And then the blue, the blue things there are shown, that came in through our proactive call in Wales.

You'll find more about all of these projects in the report, and also, we have an interactive map where, if you hover over one of these blobs, you get a wee bit of a summary about the projects. If you select the blob, you will go directly to the website for that project, so you can find out a lot more detail about that.

But, as you can see, hopefully there's quite a spread around there, with a particular cluster in Wales, which is the development projects. But we came through that call. Thinking then about that, that specific call we did for Projects in Wales, this is the kind of journey we've been on. Starting in March 2023, we put out this call for Projects in Wales, and we got in 40, really good quality expressions of interest.

And the way that our expressions of interest work is that that is a very minimal process there. You get a couple of paragraphs where you get to set out your stall of how you really speak to, the things that we were looking for. And the reason we do that is to try not to make it this really complex and burdensome thing to do to apply for funding, when ultimately, you know, you might have, in this case, a 1 in 5 chance of actually being supported.

So, we made a long list of those and assessed those through with the IYPC and with Esmée Fairbairn Foundation staff, and we ended up inviting 8 organisations to put in, full proposals. Of those, all 8 were funded, and, they began working with us over the next, what, 12 to 15 months, in developing their ideas and their partnerships, and really trying to see whether there was something there that would be, possible to take forward longer term, in the local areas.

And after over a year, we came to a position where we looked across the whole suite of our police bases grants in Wales. And looked at which of those we would support further, either in another development grant to allow them to transition out into other funding, or longer-term support, which we have put in place for two of the projects.

And again, that similar kind of look at the spread of things that we've got there. So again, we've got a really strong, set of mixed, mixed, projects in here, and we've got, within that cohort a lot of projects looking really to address barriers and inequalities in making sure that voices that are underrepresented in freshwater working are taking part in these projects and able to do so easily.

And again, thinking about, did we find the things that we wanted to support? Have we reached the places we were looking to? Well, we do have lots of new and different organisations, in the Blue Spaces programme in Wales.

6 of the projects have been delivered in partnership, which is really what we're hoping to find, and quite diverse partnerships, again, with a strong arts and creativity element, but also with academia in there, community energy, and marine organisations, so quite an eclectic mixture.

Hal Rhoades:

Next slide, please, Jenny.

Our approach, we kind of fall between lots of the different groups, I think, that, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation has just been sharing with us, but basically, we take an intergenerational approach that does employ both the social sciences and arts and creativity, to enable most notably two groups of people who don't always get involved in these kinds of conversations. Young people, in our case, that's young people aged between 12 and 18, and also tenant farmers, and also members of the community who, rural communities who don't own land, or perhaps don't influence large areas of land to be involved in these processes.

So, on the right-hand side there, you can see the members of our partnership, which is made up of us as a charity, a youth leadership group of, cumulatively, nearly 40 young people now over the years, the tenant farmers and the landowners at Penpont. And we are using social participatory tools, particularly eco-cultural mapping, as our main methodology for bringing people together, in line with what Alistair McIntosh calls the rubric of regeneration, which goes something like, we need to help one another to remember what has been dismembered, revision how things could alternatively be, and then organise to reclaim what is needed to regenerate community in the land.

And I think the critical thing there is we're trying to make sure that we give communities an opportunity to come up with their own visions, and their own ideas, and share their own knowledge to ask them, or ourselves as part of that community, what do you know, what is important to you, in a way that can be mapped spatially.

And these maps, and the reason for using maps is that they are where our personal inscapes, all of our unique relationships with land and waterscapes meet those lands and waterscapes, and where we can come to a common shared story about how the land has been, is, and could be.

So that's why we use maps in that way. Next slide, please.

And the other critical thing is, in everything we do, we try and bring inspiration and joy. So, these are a couple of images from the project. On the left, Mary Scholden, who's an expert in trees and riparian planting, working with a couple of young people, and on the right, our first youth ranger, Ella, learning how to make fire in the woods.

Next slide.

So, through Blue Spaces, we've been able to apply these methodologies specifically to looking at how we can support communities to come up with their own restoration plans for the two sub-catchments that run through the Penpoint estate. This map layer, so on the right-hand side, it's actually a tracing paper layer laid over a topographical map, is our living memory map of the Nant Sefin stream, which runs through Penpont, and on the left-hand side, you can see it in the process of creation with the community of the village of Trethlon, which is on that side of the valley where we are.

So, bringing people together to make Penpont an exemplar of intergenerational river restoration with young people, from lots of different backgrounds from the local area, whether that be the South Wales Valleys or Brecon coming together and playing the role of inquisitors in that process, people who are coming in, asking questions, developing the interviews, and ultimately leading those research processes with us. And these are about understanding rivers as our kind of indicators. They tell us what's going on in the land.

But starting with how people have noticed them change as a basis for building up plans that we can take forward together. Next slide, please.

So, I've just got a couple of slides to show having done that mapping process, which involved identifying what the key opportunities were, and combining that knowledge with our own ecological surveys and a full robust scientific baseline, we are now pursuing a restoration plan for that sub-catchment. So, this involves riparian planting. This is Forrest, who's, aptly named.

Grassland restoration, on the right-hand side there, the mother of meadows, yellow rattle, now re-emerging in our pastures, and on the left, Devil's bit Scabius being reintroduced into wetland areas. Youth-led water surveying and monitoring. We, at the moment, we have one of the young people we've worked with who went off and did a master's in freshwater ecology at Oxford, coming back and working for us to develop our community monitoring plan with young people at its heart.

And a change in the grazing system towards large areas of conservation grazing, to address one of the key issues being compaction. Next slide, please.

So, from here, Esmée are supporting us to expand our approach. This is, working in partnership with an organisation called Peak Cymru to create a map of the entire Usk catchment with a group of young artists. And we are connected now with the Usk Catchment Partnership, and with them, we've developed a programme of work for the next three years, which has three key focuses.

One is to map two more sub-catchments, the level at which we feel people most connect with and know their rivers, and create a sort of proof of concept for different lengths and types of rivers, some running entirely rurally, and others running from urban to rural to urban areas.

We also have a work stream on researching how knowledge integration from local communities, young people, elders, and others has been done effectively in river basin management around the world, and the lessons we can learn internationally for our own work in Wales and on the Usk.

And finally, putting youth voice at the heart of some policy and media work to make sure that we're able to engage and elevate what we're doing to the people who are making decisions about these things. And that starts in the Usk Catchment Partnership, which has members including the National Park, Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, Dwr Cymru, Natural Resources Wales, and others.

And just a final thing to say is that I think the thing we've really appreciated about Esmée is that they've allowed us to be experimental. We've never had to justify why involve communities and young people, which is something we often have to do to other funders, and also that they value collaborative and interdisciplinary work led by partnerships, which is also how we like to do things and we really feel that learning to improve our rivers starts with being able to see them from multiple perspectives, with multiple values in mind. So yeah, thank you very much for having me.

Simon Wightman:

Thanks, Hal. We won't have time for questions in between the presentations, but I would encourage people, if you've got any questions for Hal or any of our other speakers, just do use that Q&A function, and we will have time for those at the end. But I will now pass on to Iwan.

Iwan Edwards:

Thank you very much, Simon. I'll start in Welsh, and I'll turn to English as we go. Just remember you've got your interpretation button at the bottom of your screens.

So hello, I’m Iwan Edwards. I’m here today to provide a brief overview of the Gofod Glas project. It's a partnership based on creating a space where people and water can meet in creative ways. The project is a partnership between three organisations, North Wales, Wildlife Trust, Natural Resources Wales and Dyffryn Dyfodol. And I would also like to acknowledge that Iwan Williams from Dyffrin Dyfodol is here as a panelist today, and he will be available to answer questions in the Q&A later on as well. So you're getting two Iwans for the price of one.

We work in the River Conway catchment, one of the wettest areas in Wales, and an extremely dynamic environment. The landscape is varied from the Eryri National Park mountains in the West to the Welsh speaking farming community in the East and the South, and the coastal area is more urban, with more densely populated communities and tends to be more English speaking. It is an important salmon and sea trout fishery, and it plays a key role in hydropower generation and flood management. So, a complex place with different needs.

It is also a place full of personal connections. Here is a more creative representation of the catchment drawn by members of the Llifo Conwy network. Llifo Conwy is an environmental collaborative in North Wales, and it focuses on improving the health of the Conwy catchment. One of the first things we did with this important audience was to encourage them to draw a picture of the catchment from their perspective, and to make a note of different places on their map, simple things like where makes you happy, or which area are you concerned about, or where would you drink within the catchment? And this was a very useful exercise that revealed a personal connection that people have with the area in which they live in.

The core difference between Gofod Glas and the usual model of environmental work is its fundamental shift from expert-led, outcome-driven, pre-packaged solutions to more of a community-led, emergent, question-based process.

And the bedrock of our project is very much learning how to truly collaborate as a partnership and learn how to work in different ways. And we are intentionally moving away from that expert-led project idea by acknowledging what we don't know. We are, in effect, learning to turn off the SatNav. We slow the process down, and we resist the urge to immediately jump to solutions. But we constantly need to refocus, and to be faithful to that emergent process.

This meaningful collaboration that we have makes us more fleet of foot, and allows us to be genuinely responsive to communities when we engage with them. Next slide, please.

Our approach extends to how we engage creative facilitators in the first place. And this is a key point. We engage creatives without a brief. We didn't ask Lin Cummins, for example, to make a dress full of questions to the river. Nor did we ask David Cleary to engage with young people or groups with sensory impairments. They just did it, because that's where their passion and their energy lie. This refreshing way of working ensures that it's the creative energy of our partners, rather than a fixed deliverable that drives the project forward.

Next slide, please.

How do we engage? Well, by starting with questions, we start in a different place. We create and increase curiosity and inquisitiveness among the public. We create a space for discussion, a blue space, if you like. And explore the complexity, then, around those questions.

Our conversations with people are personal and sensory, and then these questions have led us to a new phase of the project, and here are just a few examples of what has emerged from those questions. Next slide, please.

We use the ‘Dal dy Ddwr' approach - a semi-structured interview whilst people are holding water. It's as simple as that. Starting with a more general conversation, we move more towards personal experiences and people's connections. For example, we heard a story from a contributor in Trefriw, famous for its woollen mill. And the lady's mother used to know which day of the week it was based on the colour of the river from the dyes of the woollen mill on that day. It's stories like these that help us bring the environment to life for people. Next slide.

To encourage this engagement even further, we offer £250 for ideas. We call this a gateway that allows us to engage in deeper conversations. And this investment is entirely led by individuals and by communities. It's them. They make the decisions. And it acts also as a way to reach people who might not think they are necessarily interested in freshwater in the first place. Some fantastic ideas have emerged.

For example, we funded David Wittrick's citizen-led water quality testing survey idea, and we funded Angharad Owen, who is using a GPS tracker inside a rubber duck to track river flows. These kinds of activities are answering the very questions we gathered from people in the first phase of the project. Next slide.

We maintain momentum through monthly water walks through Dur, along the river, which give our emerging community of interest a regular opportunity to engage, to connect, and cross-pollinate ideas. Different conversations with different people in different places. Next slide please.

In closing, we want to acknowledge the immense challenge we face with freshwater health. And the need for long-term solutions. We are very grateful to Esmée for being willing to fund a project that has this inherent emergent approach. However, we need duration. This is our challenge to funders, to think in this long-term way, funding people's time to engage with the public in meaningful ways.

There is no exit strategy for Gofod Glas. We are building momentum every day. Next slide.

And just to finish in the spirit of sharing by doing, rather than by showing you, which is Gofod Glas' guiding philosophy, we want you to get involved in some small way during this session. So, what if we simply start by asking the question, what question do you have about freshwater? And you can follow the link and answer that question from your own perspective, your own place, and we will share them with you all anonymously, after this, this webinar.

Okay. Diolch yn fawr iawn.

Jenny Wheeldon:

Thanks, Iwan. We'll have to share the slide, just afterwards.

Involving Young People Collective Perspective

Simon Wightman:

Thanks, Iwan. I'm going to pass over, I think, to Thalia and Ines for taking us through an Involving Young People Collective (IYPC) perspective.

Thalia Papanicolaou:

Thank you, Simon. So, hello, everyone. I'm Thalia, and I'll just be talking a little bit about who the IYPC are, before we get into the way we worked on this project. If you could go to the next slide, Jenny.

So, who are the IYPC? The partnership, between Hudl Youth Development Agency and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, was established in 2020, and our initial remit was to think a bit more about who, what, and why Esmée fund certain things, especially in relation to young people. We are a cohort-based programme or collective. People do up to three years in the Collective, so there's also an element of cyclical leadership, passing the baton to people, who also want to make the most of this kind of position. It's responding to a need for bringing young people directly into the grant-making sector to influence decision-making.

And our role is to bring our insights and lived experience and act as a critical friend to Esmée and beyond, and to expand on, the processes, projects, and funds that Esmée will work on. If you could go to the next slide.

And in terms of our ways of working, the kind of, like, guiding light that we use is called the values, or the 10 values for co-production between young people and organisations, and you can see them here on the slide. There is also a link on the Esmée website, which takes you through a set of questions of what these values actually mean to us in practice.

But it ranges from anything from ‘nothing about us without us’ believing that you know, we should be in the room when things are happening, especially when it's related to us and our lived experiences.

We also believe in communicating expectations and accountability. Celebration and fun is really important to us, but so is longevity and commitment. And we use these values to measure, but also think about how we can do things better, both internally and externally, in our working relationships, in our individual progress. And it's kind of been a guiding light for the way that we've been involved in Blue Spaces too. Next slide.

So, in terms of what we've done in this project, we've been involved since the beginning, almost. We were approached by Esmée, and a few of us jumped on a call with Jenny and Simon, and just got learning about what blue spaces and freshwater spaces actually are, because not all of us had the most experience in that area.

So, ranging from the 40 EOI applications at the beginning, reading those, helping to make decisions on them, all the way to, being on full assessment panels for, like, full proposals that were coming through. We've also done, like, site visits. I went to visit, Conwy in August last year, and I think that was really cool as well, because I think it's the first and only time that the IYPC have managed to go on a site visit. It definitely just fundamentally changed the way that I viewed the projects, beyond just, like, the three questions you get to answer on an application.

We also, did a diversity, equity, and inclusion event in Wales last year, which Ines will explain more about, but yeah, through all of this, it's just to demonstrate that we've been involved from the beginning of Blue Spaces, and now we're here at the end, thinking about all our learning, in the past two and a half years.

And we have a quote on the slide here from an Esmée staff member saying that the involvement of the Involving Your People Collective brought new perspectives on project proposals and more fun into the learning events, and then one of the IYPC said that the Blue Spaces programme has been a really big part of their whole IYPC experience, because it taught them the most about how grant programmes actually work, and I think that is true for a lot of people, because I think it's not until you start doing grants that you understand how the inner workings of these things work.

Maybe just to summarise, we were helping to make decisions, but we were also involved in the learning, and yeah, I think Ines will give us a bit more of an idea on this now.

Ines Hart:

Yeah, so I'll quickly explain an example here of something that was really highlighted by the whole of IYPC who was involved in Blue Spaces, as a highlight of the project so far, and it really is an example of successful intergenerational collaboration and that place-based learning. So, in August 2024, a few of you on the call might have come to this, actually, we identified that there was sort of a need of development within the freshwater sector in terms of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). So, Jenny allowed us the space, we came together, and, we created a workshop, in the afternoon here, where we had everyone in person in Wales, and we created this World Cafe workshop, which meant that we had these themes that you see on screen, so everything from rurality to looking at climate and social justice, and so we had everyone sort of go around the room. We also had a live interpreter as well at the time, so that was very exciting to get to grips with. But I think what this really showed was that opportunity for a workshop to be completely IYPC-led, and it really deepened our understanding of the lived experience of communities in Wales, and also how place shapes both the need and opportunity within the freshwater sector.

And I think, for us, it was a big highlight because it showed that our work is not abstract. And actually, we got to be in person and meet face-to-face with grantees, and actually have those intergenerational conversations, so, for us, I think it just really highlighted the need, for youth-led initiatives within this space. Next slide, Jenny.

So, I'll highlight some brief strengths, of the project. We did a big, audit not audit, like, reflection piece, here the last week, or two weeks ago, and some of the key highlights were that collaboration was really highlighted as a strong element of the Blue Space Programme, and, adding on to that, at the top there in the green, you can see that Esmée staff members thought that our contributions helped to make Blue Spaces more intentional and grounded in our own lived experience, and you can see there, it says, we helped to hold EF (Esmée) to account, really, in a healthy way, and it deepened the process, really, and for our own development as well, it helped to increase our understanding of grant assessments, as Thalia said, and also that sort of improved facilitation skills as well, and our own leadership capabilities.

Next slide, please.

So, to sum up, we wanted to give you practical examples of how you could embed youth voice into your own work here. So, some of the points that came up from our own reflections were to have that sort of extended timelines and scheduling consistencies with us, to have those sort of clearer expectations of the work for young people, so that they are able to approach the work and they know how to engage properly, or to the ability that they can. And to continue to have those face-to-face opportunities, really, because we benefited so much, and I think it led on to that fourth point of strengthening the communication, really. I think when you have those different opportunities to communicate in person and online, it really the word is our oyster.

And finally, I think having that structured reflection we found would be really beneficial as well, not leaving it all to the end. Having that embedded within your programs is something I think that would be really beneficial as well. Thank you.

Simon Wightman:

Brilliant. Thank you, Ines. Thank you, Thalia. And just to reiterate what an amazing process it is to have Involving Young People Collective to support us with this, the different perspectives that they bring, and the depth that they bring to the understanding of the programmes we support was brilliant from a staff perspective.

Jenny, I think I'm passing over to you now.

Jenny Wheeldon:

Yes, you are indeed. Thank you very much, everyone, for, just giving a wee bit of a flavour of the fantastic work that's been going on through the Blue Spaces projects, and thanks to all the people who were willing to speak about that today.

Programme Learnings and Reflections

Jenny Wheeldon:

Yeah, so I'm now going to just speak a little bit about some of the learning that's come out of the programme, and touch upon the different elements of that, which is in a lot more detail in the report that we've just released, but just to take you through a few of those.

So, the first thing to say is alongside the grant funding that we've had in place, we've also been running, in parallel to that, a learning programme. And that the purpose of that is to facilitate shared practice and experience between projects, and to build connections between the projects, particularly through a network where people can connect and collaborate, and potentially in the future take collective action together. We've also, as a part of the programme, done quite a lot of evaluation of both the way that we have worked together through the programme, and, the kind of impact that the projects will be having now and in the future.

So, we've got these kind of elements running in parallel to the rest of the programme. And as part of that, it's very much underpinned by a learning plan that we set in place at the beginning, which really guides and helps us make sure that we are able to say what are we achieving, what we set out to do, and how could we do that better in future? But also do that in a way that we can share with other people, like all of you on the call today.

So, we have a learning plan in place, which has got very specific questions in it, some of which you can see here. In thinking about the impact of the programme and the projects overall, it's really important to think that there's a lot of geographical variation in the work that's going on, and the context for that work.

And also, that the impact, particularly around the benefits for nature, people and places of this these programmes, is not likely to be seen until 5, 10 years down the line, so you need to be realistic about what you can actually say in terms of impacts on the ground at this stage.

But there are things that we can say in terms of how the, ways of working are going, and the types of partnerships that have come in place, and some of the kind of catchment ways of working that have developed, particularly in Wales, and that can help inform future kind of conversations.

So, I'm going to look at a couple of elements of that where we can, sort of draw some conclusions, at least. And the way that we do that, so far has been really to have conversations with all of the projects and the grantees that we have. And to capture how they feel that they're progressing, both in terms of the work, and how the funding process that we've put in place is helping support them take that forward.

So, a couple of really key areas that we have looked at so far by speaking to our projects and reflecting on, so far, what's happened is, particularly around, community initiatives. So, you can see on this slide, I had a specific question around, are we finding and supporting the right things in the right places, and how do we do that? Are we collecting and sharing that, able to collect and share that learning?

And in terms of the community initiatives, side of it, certainly from my perspective, coming from quite a straightforward environmental sector way of working. This was something that I found initially quite difficult to understand which projects should we be supporting, and how did we how could we tell whether they were actually going to be genuinely, allowing communities to take action and have influence on decisions and funding, ultimately.

So what we have developed, and, through Esmée’s other work with communities, are these set of, kind of, principles when we're thinking about how projects are working with communities. So, it's all very well for us to say, oh, we'll work with communities, and they'll help us design the thing, but how do you actually interrogate that and make sure that's the case?

So, these are the kind of things that we use as principles when we're looking at projects and proposals to say, you know, is this going to be, meaningful work with routes for communities to actually influence decisions and action in the future that can be sustained in the long term. And so these provide a really useful guide, I think, for that, when you're thinking about projects that are looking to give meaningful opportunity for communities to take action.

And through our learning network, this is, another area where we can sort of reflect on, whether that's how that can best support projects to become more than the sum of the parts, I guess, when it comes to the work they're doing. So, we have been running in parallel with the project support is a learning network.

And this brings together all of the Blue Spaces cohorts to connect and collaborate and to share experience and to learn about particular projects that we've identified, sorry, particular themes that the projects have identified as being areas that they were interested to learn more.

So, collectively, we got together in our first online meeting with all the projects, and these were the themes shown here that were identified as areas where people felt they wanted to learn more, and would like to interrogate and look at, during the process, part during the course of the programme.

And we've had four meetings online, exploring a number of these themes, and we've also had two face-to-face get-togethers, where we've looked in a bit more detail at a number of things, including, more recently, into the rights of nature, for example.

And you can see there on the right-hand side some, feedback around from participants about how valuable this learning network is, in terms of being able to take a bigger sort of a bit of a step back, and to get, slightly wider project experience by talking to others, and create connections with others, and to create collaborations. And we're certainly seeing, for example, in West Wales, a group of projects working quite closely together, and also in Scotland as well, and that's come about partly through this network getting together.

And we also make sure that we pay for people's time to attend the face-to-face things, and that's built into the project funding. And that's really important in order to enable everyone to have the same opportunity to take part in the learning and sharing through the programme.

Okay, so just, again, a brief look at some of the learning, which is elaborated a lot in the report from what we found through the programme so far. And for the freshwater sector and people working in taking action on freshwater, there's a number of things that have become really, sort of, clear to us through the programme.

The first of which is around our deciding to use development funding, which isn't something we usually do. And we've certainly found that that's been really beneficial in terms of allowing people the space to create partnerships and to nurture and foster new ideas, and also to stop things where they're not working, quickly, and be allowed to take risks and experiment in that way.

It is there is a tension around doing short-term development funding, and having that in place, because if you're working on the ground with the community and building trust and establishing relationships, that can be quite difficult when there's no guaranteed, delivery mechanism at the end of that.

So that is certainly a tension that comes about through working with shorter-term projects. But we have also seen that a number of projects have found and secured other longer-term funding off the back of the development project, and that has allowed them just to get over that initial first step.

We've seen across the board that, external factors, and particularly policy uncertainty, certainly around, for example, farm support schemes in Wales, and things like nutrient neutrality, and the kind of

So, like, flip-flopping in terms of how that policy is going to be applied has made it quite difficult for people engaging, particularly in rural areas, because

Land managers, landowners are struggling to want to commit to any kind of change, the kind of changes that are needed to improve fresh waters, when there's so much uncertainty around how they will actually be able to support their businesses in the future.

In terms of the community involvement side of things. Traditional environmental organisations aren't necessarily best placed to do that, but we've really seen that these more eclectic partnerships that we've had in place, have really enabled those projects to make the most of the skills, the most appropriate skills to work with communities, and to make really strong links with people who are already embedded in those local places is really critical to doing that well.

The role of Arts and creativity has been really interesting. We've had a little bit of information on that before, before, earlier today. And that has really, really shown to bring different new audiences, different people, different voices to the table in taking action around fresh water. And that's been one of the most, sort of, I guess, eye-opening and informative aspects for me, certainly.

We have been able to demonstrate a number of catchment-based ways of working, particularly in Wales, where there's no formal structure established. And the learning from that is feeding into conversations with Natural Resources Wales, who are really thinking about how to take forward catchment working in Wales, which is particularly important in in in view of the shake-up of the water regulatory sector that's coming up, and the desire to work with, sort of regional planners on water delivery. So that is contributing to the conversations about how things move forward, particularly in Wales.

We've certainly seen that the projects have been reaching the audiences, and I've spoken about that. An element we also have seen and haven't touched on is that that, all the projects most a lot of the projects took a lot of time to do quite rigorous training and, improve the quality of their citizen science. And to make that much easier for regulators to then take action around things like water pollution reports. And that can be really effective use of time and energy to do citizen science, where you've got really clear training and really clear routes for that to be acted upon by regulators.

In terms of funders, which of which there are probably fewer on the call, so I'm going to go through that fairly quickly, but we've found that we've had to adapt the funding approach at Esmée Fairbairn Foundation in order to make this work.

And needed to be very flexible in terms of, we thought at the start we would have a lovely, neat programme of 6 projects for long-term funding at this point, but actually the reality of these things take a lot, lot longer and, a lot of these a lot of our projects don't know where they're going to end up, because they're genuinely community-led, and that's been something that we've needed to adapt to and change to over time.

We certainly found that just the fact that we ask applicants about the diversity, equity, and inclusion elements for their projects, that has prompted organisations to think much harder about that, and to take really positive steps to improve their approach to getting different voices to the table and underrepresented groups. So even just by having that conversation as a funder, that has prompted quite a lot of positive action there.

We have seen new and unusual partnerships, which is great. That's presented some challenges we wouldn't have thought of in terms of, for example, when people start working together and start working with new audiences, they need to think about how safeguarding arrangements are going to be put in place at not just one organisation, but across the organisations. And that's something that wasn't perhaps quite so obvious to people from the off, or to us.

We've found that the independence of our funding has been really important. A lot of catchment-based projects are very much funded by regulators and water companies. That makes it hard for them to then, challenge, perhaps practices and things that that those very organisations are doing. So, the independence of our funding is really important to enable people to still challenge what they see as, perhaps poor practice or regulation.

The sector and network development I've spoken about, in terms of building capacity and that being really beneficial for people to be networked together. And, we've certainly found, through our work, that there are some really fantastic, community place-based initiatives out there, and we've been able to explore some of the things that perhaps are needed in order to help people grow those into meaningful action at scale.

So, just bringing that together before we go into our Q&A then, certainly our Blue Spaces programme is already informing the way that we're working as a funder. It's informed our youth-led creativity program, and it's going to play into our Seascapes work in the next few years. And the programme has really shown that we certainly need to still strategically allocate our resources. And place-based work is going to continue being part of the way that we work.

And we're currently considering, and we'll look at that further through our Seascapes programme. We've seen a really strong demand for skills development within the freshwater sector, and we're now thinking about what our role may be in facilitating that in the future.

And we'll continue to support broad freshwater organisations, such as the Rivers Trust and River Action, who are working across the UK, but we'll also be keeping an eye out for specific place-based proposals with new partnerships, that are taking a community-led approach to freshwater action.

And, we're still very conscious that it's really important that our independence as a funder enables people to, still look to influence and challenge, regulators, polluters, and the like, in in their activities to really make sure that there's still that there's that ability to campaign in the freshwater sector, and that's supported by an independent funder.

So we'll continue to learn and share, and we'll continue to support community-led change in our work, and we hope that we can share our learning with others, to help scale up the work that's going on in the freshwater sector.

Finally, if you want to find more of the details, our full report on Blue Spaces is now available, but I'm now going to hand back over to Simon to, sort of compere any questions. And we are using the Q&A function, that you have available to ask questions, so that's probably the easiest way to do that. So I'll just hand back to Simon, but thanks to everybody who's taken part, so far, and look forward to hearing your questions.

Simon Wightman:

Thanks, Jenny.

Q&A

Simon Wightman:

Yeah, there is still time to submit your questions on that Q&A function. We've got time to go through a few there. We've also got some questions on the Menti board that we might be able to pull out and have a little chat and get some of the panel's perspectives on.

But I'm just going to kick off with a brilliant question from Alice, on the Q&A.

Which is, what lessons have you learned about scaling community-led restoration from sub-catchment pilots to a whole-catchment approach? And what pitfalls should we avoid as we plan something similar?

And Hal, I know you're looking at moving from the Penpont, specific project into the whole Usk, and working with partners in that way, so I wonder if I might go to you first.

Hal Rhoades, Action for Conservation:

Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. And I can tell you of our experience, I don't I don't think we have an answer. I think there's a fundamental tension between the idea of scaling up a process and scaling a process across. I think that's the first thing to say is, were the right amount of finance available, I think it would be ideal to take an approach that meets people where they are and is genuinely place-based. You can imagine, you know, if money were no object, I'd go sub-catchment by sub-catchment simultaneously, doing their own processes with spaces where people can then come together in a kind of a relatively, decentralised, bioregional approach. But knowing that that's not the position that we're in. I think you just have to adjust your expectations of what people are going the level at which you'll be able to engage people, and the goals in which you're doing that. At Penpont, we've kind of mapped at all three of those scales at a land base that's within a catchment, a sub-catchment level, and then we did that I showed that large catchment scale map, and I think, what we learned by doing those things, kind of following a similar, philosophy to Iwan, in the sense of having it open-ended to see, like, well, what happens if we do this? What do we learn? Is that the resolution of information that you can expect to gather from people gets lower, the larger the scale is that you're looking at. People's observations of a whole river system, if you ask them about those, are much more generalised than they are if you're asking them about this stretch of stream that they know extremely well. So, you have to change your expectations of the information you're getting if you're scaling up like that.

And the other thing is, generally speaking, the same thing happens with the kind of connections you're trying to create with people. So, ask people set up an event where your aim is to get loads and loads of people through to learn about what they know. The connections you make with them are weaker and not as enduring as the kind of community-building approach that we or Gofod or Glas are taking. So, I mean, my preference, in a, in a sort of process approach would be to sort of take a thousand flowers bloom approach and do multiple simultaneous processes of this kind, knowing that people relate to place in that way. And where that's not possible, I think you have to change your expectation of what you're hoping for, and know that you may still be doing far better than would otherwise be done in terms of engagement. But it is less sort of co-creation, co-management, and more, yeah, co-design, and then not co-delivery, or whatever it might be. And being upfront and honest with people about that. What are the limitations. So that, I think, frustrated expectations, and feelings, of kind of being shut out, go hand in hand, really. Setting those expectations with people clearly and early is very important.

Simon Wightman:

Thanks, Hal. And Iwan, in the work that you've been doing, have you found that tension between people's connection with a specific bit of a river, and thinking the whole thinking about a system, the river as a system, or is that something you work through?

Iwan Edwards, North Wales Wildlife Trust:

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think we you know, working on a catchment scale is incredibly daunting, to try and think that you can achieve anything of lasting value within a 12-month project, or even a 5-year project, you know, is not realistic. And I think people appreciate that, and I think people share our frustration with a lack of progress when it comes to river health, in particular freshwater health in general. People want to see things happen much quicker. The thing that's going to get that going quicker is people. So I think managing the expectation, as Hal has mentioned, is a key part of it, and I think I, personally, have always been quite quick to try and jump to solutions, to try and find the quickest route to a solution that I can find. You come up against a problem, whether it's about freshwater, or hedges, or trees, or any subject you like. You come up against that issue, and you have to find a way to explore the problem with people.

No one can solve, these problems in isolation. Nothing exists in in isolation, and we have to reflect that. And my partners within Gofod Glas, Dyffryn Dyfodol and Natural Resources Wales, have to remind me from time to time not to rush to solutions. Because that's where you can potentially make mistakes. By following the kind of emergent approach, you let those answers uncover themselves. It takes time. But in the long term, it's a much more sustainable approach, and it has multiple outputs beyond what you've set out to achieve in the first place. So, to use water as an analogy, it's kind of, you know, building up the amount of water in that reservoir, whatever size that reservoir is, up to a point where it starts to spill over the sides and starts to influence other things, and starts to, you know, enable change to happen. But yeah, we have to be incredibly realistic, and stop kidding ourselves to some degree about what we can achieve with a set amount of funding within a set amount of time.

Simon Wightman:

Thanks, Iwan, that's really helpful. And just a reminder that although we don't have very much time for questions on today's call, we will commit to including some responses from the panellists to those questions we don't get round to.

And I just wanted to pick up a question from Samantha that was that was answered online, but I think there's a really interesting bit from your projects more broadly about you have government and regulator policies and strategies within these rivers. They can be very dry and inaccessible to people who want to change things in the places where they live. I just wonder if the panelists have got any reflections on working with regulators and government agencies through their sort of community-centred programmes.

I will go, Iwan, because NRW has been a partner in your project, if I could go to you first.

Iwan Edwards, North Wales Wildlife Trust:

Yeah, they certainly have, and yeah, we have, I mean, it's an interesting an interesting point to make, isn't it? Can you just, just quickly repeat the question there? I just my attention was taken by something happening outside my window. Just quickly repeat the question there, please.

Simon Wightman:

How do we how do we get better at joining up community aspirations for the places that they live with, regulator and government policy around rivers? How do we how do we make those connections more effectively?

Iwan Edwards, North Wales Wildlife Trust:

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, when it comes to when it comes to regulation, we're trying, it's about, kind of, unearthing people's connection with the environment. And I think at this point, I'd kind of invite you and Iwan Williams from Dyffryn Dyfodol to join me in answering this question.

It's, you know, it's a particularly, huge topic to deal with, and, you know, we have Natural Resources Wales are a big part of the project. Iwan, would you have any input on that particular question?

Iwan Williams, Dyffryn Dyfodol:

Well, it's a really good question. I think one of the things we're lucky with is that, we've got NRW round the table with us, National Resources Wales, and I think part of what's worked for us is finding people who understand our way of working, what we're trying to achieve, really, and that's easier said than done. I'm not sure how we found the amazing people that we're collaborating with, but I think one of our focuses has been to look at relationships beyond organisations as well. So, kind of, how can we take the badge off when we come through the door, and actually, kind of, be part of the project as individuals, as well as, kind of, that background, the organisation that I work for. What that's meant for us is we've had really open, honest conversations. Anything can be brought up, which means that, yeah, we don't have to hide away from the real issues that are facing all of us, really. And everyone working for all those organisations, government organisations, voluntary organisations, we all really want the same thing. We want better freshwater, healthier freshwater. So, yeah, part of it for us, I think, is having that relationship with individuals, yeah, and that being a really important starting point.

Simon Wightman:

Brilliant, thank you, thank you both. I was going to come to the panel and ask for one sort of takeaway, but I'm not sure we've actually got time, so just really conscious of time. I think, to be honest, the conversation always just gets going towards the end of the Q&A session, so it's a shame we don't have a little bit longer.

But I just wanted to thank everybody for attending, to the panel, to colleagues behind the scenes who've answered some of the questions. Just a reminder that we will take some of those questions we didn't get around to, and post responses on the website.

To thank Gairmon, our translator for doing a brilliant job there as well. Blue Spaces Learning report is now available on our website, so do check that out. The link is the final slide that I think Jenny will we share, but if you have any questions about the programme, do get in touch with us at Esmée, and we will do our best to help.

Before I signed off, I just wanted to take, an opportunity to say a special thank you to Jenny, who has just done a fantastic job in terms of holding the programme together, developing it, ensuring that the learning was taken on board by us at Esmée Fairbairn Foundation in how we went forward.

She has done so much to make the programme a success, her commitment to supporting those that we've worked with, her good humour, and her technical expertise. So, she will be missed as she goes back to Natural England, which is her day job, but a huge thank you from us at Esmée, and from the rest of the Blue Spaces team.

Thank you, everybody, very much indeed, and have a brilliant afternoon. Thank you.