In Our Nature Community Get Together

In Our Nature is helping to create a climate movement for Manchester by providing opportunities for people who are doing great climate work across the city to come together, celebrate, connect, share ideas and inspire one another.  

Over the last three years In Our Nature has supported Manchester’s residents to deliver 82 projects on a range of topics from transport to urban greening, saving energy, reducing, reusing and recycling. Over 3,000 people have been involved or benefitted from these projects, and we’ve saved 45 tonnes of carbon - now that’s worth celebrating! 

So, in July we held our final Community Get Together event at the People’s History Museum. 91 attendees came together to recognise the amazing work being done by residents to reduce carbon emissions, connect with each other and be inspired to take further action on climate change. We must also give a special shout out to the lovely folks at Open Kitchen for cooking up some great veggie food to tuck into too! 

Meet our inspiring panel of Community Champions

Big thank you to Lucille from Loveworld Medical Volunteer Corps, Claire from SNUG, Andrew from The Message Community Garden, Jenny from St Margaret’s Centre & Playing Fields and Bhagwant from Sri Guru Singh Sabha Gurdwara for sharing your stories and insights about working with In Our Nature and the fantastic projects you’ve delivered in your communities.  

Lucille has been working with In Our Nature and Groundwork’s Green Doctors to teach people practical ways to save energy at home, attending different bible study workshops to help spread awareness of how to save money by making your home more energy efficient.

We supported Claire to get even more members of the local community to connect with nature in Crowcroft Park by creating promotional materials and information boards in different languages, bringing a translator along to sessions and delivering a social media workshop.  

“Every time I walk into the orchard garden space, and I see what the community has achieved, I'm blown away by how amazing it looks.” 

Andrew teamed up with In Our Nature, Morgan Sindall and the EMERGE collective to help transform the space at The Message into a garden for growing fruit and veg as well as an area for local wildlife and communities to enjoy too.  

“I'm proud of having an idea and then seeing it come to fruition and then when I see people making friends and having fun and smiling and thinking ‘I had a little bit to play in that’, that's what I'm proud of.” 

We’ve been working with Jenny and the St Margarets Centre on lots of different things. From helping them to install a new bike shelter to encourage more cycling within the local community, to delivering veggie BBQ cook along sessions and an orchard clean up with men’s mental health group, Mandem Meetup. St Margarets Centre also hosted us for one of our Community Champions events, where attendees learnt how to recycle old wheelie bins into composting facilities. 

“In Our Nature have just been amazing. Lizzie, Josie, Sophie [members of the In Our Nature team] are just so friendly and open and are willing to kind of come along and help out.” 

We supported Bhagwant and the wider community at Sri Guru Singh Sabha Gurdwara to make some changes to their gurdwara to reduce energy loss and help people to make changes in their own homes too. 

“Not only are you going to save money [by saving energy], but you're also going to become part of the family of people in the world who care for the environment and care for the energy consumption of the world.” 

What ya got? Swap!

Climate action just works better when we’re all in it together.  

With so many brilliant and talented people in the room we wanted to make the most of it. Coordinated by our Steering Group and chaired by Manchester Climate Change Youth Partnership member, Jessica, we ran a workshop which focussed on people sharing what skills they could offer one another to take their work even further. 

Here’s a summary of the skills in the room…

🌱 Sustainability & Environment Skills

• Carbon footprint calculations & measurements 

• Energy advice, retrofitting & appliance use 

• Science & energy collaboration 

• No dig gardening / Forest & bee-friendly planting 

• Sustainable cooking & upcycling 

• Tools to measure event sustainability 

• Supporting climate-related sustainable behaviours 

• Mushroom/wildlife workshops 

• Gardening 

🤝 Community Engagement & Volunteering Skills

• Willing to volunteer 

• Fundraising & corporate volunteering 

• Delegating & organising volunteers 

• Repair Cafés – setup & volunteering 

• Youth voice, event participation 

• Representing adults with disabilities 

• Learning disability/autism awareness & inclusion 

💬 Communication & Media Skills

• Social media setup/content creation 

• Copywriting, writing for impact, editing 

• Newsletters, producing well-presented documents 

• Translation (Urdu & Punjabi) 

• Networking, public presenting 

🛠️ Practical & Technical Skills 

• Construction/building 

• Sewing, knitting, crocheting etc. 

• Baking 

• Cooking 

• Making natural cordage 

• Excel support 

• Using Microsoft software 

📊 Planning, Admin & Management Skills

• Funding applications/grants 

• Budget planning & setting 

• Admin & project management 

• Navigating bureaucracy in local authorities 

• Setting up a CIC 

🧠 Wellbeing & Education Skills

• Running wellbeing events 

• Psychotherapy 

• Bushcraft & wilderness activities 

• Workshops (mushroom, wildlife etc.) 

• Teaching confidence (e.g. cycling buddies) 

We encouraged everyone to share their skills and contact details using the community noticeboard and we hope that this will enable groups and individuals to go on supporting and connecting with one another.

Big thanks to our Steering Group!

Thank you to our Steering Group members for helping to design and coordinate the Community Get Together event! We couldn’t have done it without you. 

And thank you to everyone who joined us!

100% of those surveyed agreed that the event was inspiring; Nearly all of those surveyed made useful contacts and got good tips to help them with their community projects. Climate action. Its #InOurNature.

We hope this event, and the In Our Nature programme as a whole, has helped Manchester’s communities and individuals to see just how important they are to the climate movement. That their work is recongised, valuable and part of something bigger. 

If you are someone doing great work in your community, or you want to start, join our network of Community Champions to start sharing ideas and supporting one another to take your great work even further.