Our Roots to Shoots Project

SUPPORTING OUR LOCAL COMMUNITIES

Tea, coffee and biscuits!

The catalyst of a GREAT community group.

Have a read here or visit the community pages to find out about how the Roots to Shoots project is already supporting local communities. If you want to get involved with any of the groups already working on projects, please contact us or the group directly. The groups are a friendly bunch that often meet weekly and have their community at heart.

If you have an idea for your local community, we may be able to offer support in developing it. Please contact us now using the form, here. We look forward to hearing from you.

Read more about our £2m seven-year programme running 2017-2024 below.

The Full Story

Roots to Shoots - what's it all about?

This seven year programme is all about our ex-industrial landscapes – improving and enhancing our local open green spaces, increasing their use, involving residents in the spade-work, and increasing the sense of ownership and value. These are your spaces – come and shape them with us.

With just under £2m of ‘Create Your Space’ funds awarded by the National Lottery Community Fund to cover the period 2017 and 2024, we’re able to support a mix of public pathway, fencing, building, landscape, ecology and interpretation works, along with a wide range of community activities, events, play, volunteering, training and education. Oh, and we’re trying to establish small scale renewable electricity generation, too.

About half of the funding is for physical improvements – and we call these the ‘area’ projects. Around £250k is for project activities – which we call the ‘connections’ projects. The balance is for staffing, overhead and running costs.

By July 2021 – after four of the seven project years - we’d spent 26% of the £2m. We’re behind where we thought we’d be, but the National Lottery Community Fund is allowing us to carry forward the whole balance of the unspent funding to use from Autumn 2021 until Summer 2024. Our spend and progress reports are submitted every six months to the Lottery.

Roots to Shoots is an assembly of loads of activities, some underway, some in development, some awaiting permissions…all with scope to get involved and make these spaces yours now and for generations to come.

Find out more about the breadth of this ground-breaking programme and the people who can help you to be part of it.

Back in 2016 we successfully applied to be part of an experimental programme being run by the National Lottery Community Fund called Create Your Space. It is co-funded by the Welsh Government – making key links with the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act 2015. BHT secured just under £2m in March 2017 for a seven-year scheme of improvements and activities focussed around our ex-industrial green open spaces. We call this project ‘Roots to Shoots’, linking our industrial and natural origins with the opportunities to do more with – and get more from – the environment that industry left behind.

For Roots to Shoots we set out the following:

Our Vision - is for residents in and around Brymbo to value the outdoor spaces on their doorstep, to use them and to feel a sense of ownership of them for their generation and generations to come.

Our Mission - We want to use our former industrial spaces to connect people with and within their community, to share values and experiences, to work together to overcome challenges, and to enable sustainable change.

Our Theory of change - We believe that by working together to improve i) the quality of spaces, ii) people’s confidence to use them, and iii) people’s desire and capacity to manage them, we can iv) achieve a change in culture that increases communities’ stake in their usage. We don’t expect everyone who gets involved to progress through all four steps, nor do we expect every space we improve to provide scope for all four steps to be achieved.

Our Values - We propose to work with a series of individual spaces, and to work with groups of people who have ideas to improve the way people use those spaces. We’re using the principles of asset-based community development and co-production to make the place better by making the best use of our resources. In doing so we’ll be guided by a series of values:

work with an open and inclusive approach, reaching those harder to reach and likely to benefit most from getting involved;
work to foster collective action, helping people to take the initiative and work together to solve challenges;
celebrate and highlight Welsh identity, language and culture;
work to learn from each other, and to increase our skills and knowledge through sharing;
strengthen our area’s community infrastructure, our groups and social enterprises, their connections with each other, and improve the physical connections between the spaces we work with and the routes to them; and
respecting and where possible strengthening the biodiversity of the spaces we work with.