Over £150k awarded to rewilding projects with a focus on including young people
Melanie May | 16 January 2025 | News
Over £150,000 is being awarded to eleven rewilding projects across Britain working to help combat the ‘teenage dip’ in nature connectivity and bring young people into rewilding.
Rewilding Britain is awarding up to £15,000 each to the projects through its Rewilding Innovation Fund. The projects are focused on introducing rewilding to children and young people through rewilding education and play spaces, interactive rewilding education and youth-led rewilding, and are based across the UK from the Highlands of Scotland to inner city London.
Scouts is among the recipients. The charity nationally manages Adventure Centres across England for young people, which extend across more than 300 hectares in some of the UK’s most valuable and vulnerable protected landscapes, including Ashdown Forest and the Lake District. Funding awarded by Rewilding Britain will help reconnect Scout Adventure Centres with nature and bring in expertise to translate recent habitat reviews into step-by-step management plans to bring the principles of rewilding to these popular Scouting spaces.
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Bex Craske, Group Sustainability Manager at Scouts, said:
“At Scouts, we create opportunities for young people to thrive in nature and develop skills for life. Scouting provides young people with new opportunities for fun, adventures and chances to learn about the world in which they live. Funding from Rewilding Britain has enabled us to create a framework for the next decade to ensure nature spanning our sites gets the opportunity to thrive too. The new framework will give Scouts the chance to learn new skills, including practical nature recovery techniques, understanding and tracking biodiversity gain and continuing to explore their connection to nature.”
Other charities awarded funding include The Wilderness Foundation, based in Essex, to support its outdoor education programme, and rewilding movements established and run directly by young people, such as Youngwilders, which for the past three years, in collaboration with the Knepp Wildland Foundation, has hosted youth rewilding summit Overgrowth (previously known as Resurgence).
Over half of attendees since 2022 have received subsidised tickets and travel support, and now, supported by the funding, Youngwilders is extending the scope of the summit to deliver an additional summit in the north of England and running a series of online activations to connect the two events.
Eight further projects have been awarded up to £15,000 each, including several species reintroduction projects.
Sara King, Rewilding Manager at Rewilding Britain, said:
“Children are often naturally drawn to nature – think mud pies, sliding down grassy banks, making daisy chains, chasing birds. But then suddenly there’s this dip when the teen years hit, which can last well into adulthood, of disconnection and disinterest in nature.
“We are one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world and encouraging the next generation to be more informed and embrace wild nature is critical to nature’s recovery.
“These projects are doing amazing, innovative things to engage young people in rewilding, whether that’s offering outdoor education in wild spaces, bringing the joys of rewilding into previously managed spaces or using technology to educate young people on what rewilding means and how it can shape their future.”
More funding available
Since 2021, the twice-yearly Rewilding Innovation Fund has funded 55 initiatives. Projects have two opportunities to apply each year, in the new year and summer. A funding window is currently open with a deadline of 28 February for applications.
To apply for funding – with up £15,000 available per project – projects must be:
- based in Britain (England, Wales and Scotland)
- cover at least 40 hectares of contiguous land
- part of the Rewilding Network (it is possible to join at the point of application)
- rewilding (or about to) at scale – potentially as a group of landowners – and to these rewilding principles
There is also an annual Challenge Fund.
About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.