nature workshopsthe best classroom is roofed only by the sky

People are feeling the pinch in their pockets and many are not feeling too comfortable in their work or personal lives either. If you need solutions for your personal journey or with your staff and colleagues we might have just the right solution for you outdoors in the natural world. Here we have details of what training people can do with us, how you might learn nore about plants for medicines and examples of research projects.

From February 2012 we will become a National Open College Network course provider offering accredited training to people over the age of 14 in offering a wide range of subjects to improve outdoor skills, health and well being and personal development. Click here to see our full list but also ring us with specific requirements if you don’t see what you need.

Bid writing We have a team of bid writers with experience of writing successful bids for £500 to £50, 000 from the Lottery, Trusts and public tenders.

All agencies need to prove what they do to make a difference and we can help you and your agency do this across all aspects of the ‘triple bottom line’. As with everything we do we can come to you and use the natural world near to you and your agency. Current offers and projects include:

• Good from Wood where we are working as part of a regional project to measure the impact of being the natural world.
• Emotional Literacy Checklists We are experienced social researchers and use these checklists to provide us with quantitative data about the impact of the work we do with children and young people. Research ‘If you go down to the woods today… building confidence and changing behaviour in a Cornish woodland’ (2mb Word doc) is our 2010 research where we used several different types of measuring tools.
• Planning for Real® is a unique community planning model that has helped thousands of people across the world shape the neighbourhoods and communities where they live. We can deliver the programme with your community.
• Consultation techniques also include running our sessions in the natural world to elicit specific information from all ages and backgrounds of target groups of people using qualitative audio and visual methods to suit the group.
• Teambuilding with specific groups of people in your organization to help bring people together to dream a little, to make future plans and help problem solving and conflict resolution.

We offer a range of training and awareness raising about how you might use plants for medicines (click here for more info), we can even come to your home for a special event and show you is in the hedgrow around you and what you can make in your kitchen.

Also working with the Transition movement we are part of a project to provide a tested process by which communities might start to make their own basic medicines thereby reducing our reliance on the big pharmaceuticals. ‘Folk remedies from Europe:medicines for a post oil age’ outlines our aspiration to work with Plymouth Univeristy to conduct research across Eastern Europe in impoverished rural communities where old herbal tradtions have survived.

If you need answers to questions about your agency, clients, audience, products or climates in which you work we can help you find the answers. We have research skills ranging from social, environmental and biological. For example:

Rural poverty and resilience  This work links direct action and movements towards greater social justice and local power. It is a subjective piece opening up a discussion about people living in areas of high deprivation and the belief that those with the least to lose are already on the road to full resilience and therefore have the greatest potential to lead in the post oil world. This lecture has been presented at Bangor University and the Combined University of Cornwall.

These are some of the groups and companies we have worked with:

We work in partnership directly with parents and children who have clubbed together, and with individual schools (Mousehole, Fourlanesend and Perranarworthal Primaries) and groups of schools via Extended Services groups. We have worked for Tregenna Castle Hotel, Penryn Childrens Centre,  DCATCH (working with children with disabilities), Childrens Services Research Group, CLEAR (Children Linked to and Experiencing Abusive Relationships), Cornwall Neighbourhoods for Change, Duchy College, Trifle Gathering arts group, local hotels and holiday parks, National Trust, Forestry Commission, Cornwall Centre for Volunteers, Chyan Community Fields, private landowners). We also work with adults via the Cornwall Partnership Trust