BLOG: Empowering communities through green hubs
This blog explores the role of green community hubs in empowering local people, and introduces Groundwork’s new Northern Network programme.
One of the key pieces of learning from our new report – From The Ground Up: empowering communities through environmental action – is the importance of ‘hubs’ in community development. Having a physical space as a base for a range of activities allows the benefits to be sustained and for people to build networks of trust in a place that is safe and familiar. At Groundwork, we believe that green community hubs should be at the heart of the government’s planned Communities and Relationships strategy, as it looks for ways to ‘level up’ neighbourhoods across the UK.
What are green community hubs?
Green community hubs are natural spaces that are activated as a base for community activities and networks. They might be community gardens, parks, nature reserves, or a small pocket of land on a housing estate. Green community hubs form part of the social infrastructure of a neighbourhood – the places and spaces that enable social connections to flourish.
Our 2020 report, Growing Spaces: community hubs and their role in recovery, explored the benefits that three green community hubs in different parts of the country were creating for local people, and imagined the role they could play as we emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic. Each of the hubs was unique, but they had a lot in common. They all fostered good relationships within the community and helped to increase people’s knowledge, skills, and resilience. The ‘green’ elements of the hubs increased local people’s access to nature, improving mental and physical health as well as stimulating a greater appetite for action on climate change and biodiversity loss.
Two years later, the potential of green community hubs is clearer than ever. Through stories like Julie’s, Colin’s and Hellen’s, we have seen how green spaces can make a huge difference to people’s lives as well as building strength and resilience in local neighbourhoods.
But we know that access to green space is unequal. The latest edition of the Fields in Trust Green Space Index found that almost three million people do not have publicly accessible green spaces within a ten-minute walk of where they live. We explored these inequalities in our 2021 report, Out of Bounds, and found that lack of proximity is not the only driver of these inequalities. Poor accessibility, both within and around the space, lack of relevance in the design of the space and what goes on there and feeling unsafe or unwelcome are among the complex barriers that disabled people, people on lower incomes, women, and people from ethnic minority backgrounds are more likely to experience.
The Northern Network
For all these reasons, Groundwork Trusts across the north of England got together to think about how we can support marginalised communities to achieve their full potential through the creation of a network of green community hubs. The idea for the Northern Network was born and a grant of £341k from the National Lottery Community Fund was secured to support a pilot of the model.
The aim of the Northern Network is to co-create a vibrant network of green community hubs in partnership with members of the local community. Using a place-based approach, the hubs will build on existing assets, providing a broad range of services to build resilience and improve health outcomes for local people. Communities will be supported to take the lead on decision-making and the design of each hub, choosing activities that suit the needs of their neighbourhood. The Northern Network will aim to reach communities that currently have poor access to nature and services, co-creating solutions to the inequalities they face.
We hope that this project, which will run from September 2022 to February 2024, will create a framework and evidence base for the creation of green community hubs, enabling more communities to join the network in the future. In the meantime, we’ll continue working alongside communities and shouting about the changes they are making, one green community hub at a time.
Blog by Fay Holland, Groundwork Policy & Research Lead