Most of us know how to take care of ourselves physically but fewer know how to take care of ourselves mentally and emotionally. Our activities, funded through Caerphilly County Borough Council’s ‘Shared Prosperity Fund’ in collaboration with the Green Grid Partnership help people to do this – after being on one of our sessions, participants tell us they are less stressed and happier. Our activity provides the space and support to unplug and create time for the things that matter whilst, at the same time, offering tools and techniques to take care of our total wellbeing and building self-resilience to deal more effectively with the challenges of life.
We Climb Trees
Mixed group of adults and children
Families came together to gain new experiences exploring how they felt about their relationship with nature learning new skills, gaining confidence in using woodland tools by also making their own tools (wooden mallets, whistles and pegs) to take home and creating crafts from natural objects. The children crafted wooden reindeers out of branches fallen from the forest.
They were shown how to safely create and extinguish a fire for cooking and keeping warm as well as learning how to work safely with knives and saws to create their items.
The parents were amazed at how their children’s confidence grew over the sessions and at the competence levels they achieved for the children and themselves.
Wonders in the dark skies
The night time activity of bat, moth and owl detecting was also a mixed group where children came with their parents to see what flies in our night skies. They were supplied with bat detectors for the evening locating the echo frequencies bats emitted to locate their next meal and to communicate with one another.
The Ecologist, funded through the project, explained how each bat used different frequencies which is how they were able to identify each bat and that with equipment participants could become part of a citizen science army of volunteers who share and record findings to monitor species to ensure we are aware of increases and decreases in their numbers.
The Gathering Places
Now that we are delivering these sessions we soon recognised we really needed to create alternative safe gathering spaces, a space close enough to be accessible but secluded enough to obtain the peace and tranquillity required for uninterrupted wellbeing and learning. This meant our volunteers helped create that ‘Goldylocks’ spot and a space by the scouring brook waterfall. We cut spaces between trees that wouldn’t be strong enough to grow fully because of crowded tree cover. We even gained new volunteers from one of the groups we had delivered a sessions to, a youngster wanting to gain experience for a Duke of Edinburg’s award and a dad for a healthy past time, win win for all of us!
Forest Bathing
Sometimes life gets too much and you need a pause. Even computers sometimes need a reboot. Forest bathing gives us that permission to stop, take a breath and allow ourselves to just be about us in that moment where everything else is left behind.
