Eco-community: The Caretakers Project

Over the past couple of months I have been supporting the team at Bethnal Green Nature Reserve to develop the Caretakers Project as part of my London National Park City Ranger mischief! The project is an experiment in pooling the collective knowledge and experience of people who initiate, volunteer for, tend to and otherwise take care of London’s grassroots ecological spaces from community allotments to tiny forests, kerbside parklets and neighbourhood orchards.

The hope is to generate a set of resources that can be used to train, skill up, inspire and nourish others working and volunteering in similar roles. There are already numerous, generous, adequate how-to guides in existence but the guides that have emerged offer teachings in the form of stories, sensory experiences, personal anecdotes and site-specific tales. Crucially, each addresses care of spaces, care of the more-than-human and care of the caretakers Through a series of preliminary knowledge exchange sessions guides that have emerged include: “A user’s guide to icky jobs”, “Whiling away the hours in nature” and “The Oak & the Jay: A Symbiosis”.

Head to the website - have a read, try them out and give us feedback on their usefulness. The aim is to gently cultivate guides from all kinds of spaces and voices across the city and the guides may be iterated over time. If you have a story to tell and are interested in contributing a guide, head to the website for more info.