Urban Nature offers young people the opportunity to explore a vast range of environmental ideas, here are some of the inspirational projects initiated by some of our member clubs to date.

Young people from Samuel Montagu Youth Centre, based in Greenwich, reclaimed an adjacent redundant garden over the summer and organised a programme of activities with the support of Community Services to remove all the rubbish and transform the space into a ‘blank canvas’ for their future projects.

Now that the groundwork has been prepared and the construction of the chicken run has been completed the young people have now started to draft up a plan for who will be responsible for the chicken’s care on a daily basis.

As well as their chicken project the young people are looking at a whole host of ways in which they can involve and train other young people in being a part of the project through various initiatives, such as bee-keeping, growing fruit and vegetables and building bird, bee and bug houses.

Generate, a special needs youth group based in Wandsworth, decided upon re-designing the garden area at their centre. Raised beds have been built using recycled scaffold boards in preparation for their bamboo planting. The area will eventually become somewhere for delivering workshops and to relax. An environmental programme has now been incorporated into their term-time and holidays. Further projects include developing the remainder of garden and running cycling awareness schemes.

As part of their summer programme a group of young people at Samuel Lithgow Youth Centre in Camden started their first environmental project, a large scale mural within the youth centre. The group spent a number of weeks discussing the ideas and design and finally agreed upon an environmental awareness theme. Their aim is to send a strong message out to the young people at the youth club about how they can have a positive impact upon the environment. 

The young people have also installed recycling bins within the youth centre and are responsible for promoting their usage. They monitor them on a weekly basis and they have so far been successfully ‘consuming’ the correct waste.

‘The Environmental Project has been amazing, not only for the young people, but it has taken the centre forward as whole. It truly encompasses the kind of youth participation that we have been striving for, in that the ideas as well as the action driving the project forward has been because of the determination and graft from young people. It is great to see the young people thriving in leadership and responsibility’

Sarra Dore – Youth Development Worker, SMYC