Join the youth-led nature recovery movement!
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By Molly Easton, Co-Director of Youngwilders
Are you a nature curious young person keen to spend more time outdoors but not sure where to start? Do you want to learn more but feel you don’t have the sufficient skills, money, or the time to take off work?
If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the above then Youngwilders is for you! Three years ago, we came together as a group of friends because all of the above applied to us. We were worried about the climate and biodiversity crisis, desperate to see nature bounce back, but we couldn’t find a satisfying outlet for these feelings. We set ourselves the mission of setting up our own nature recovery project, mass messaging landowners and councils to see if anyone had land they’d be willing to let us manage, all while visiting and learning from as many rewilding projects as we could access around the country.
As we dug further into the nature sector, it became clear there were real problems needing fresh solutions. Firstly, youth engagement was often surface-level. Youth steering groups were starting to appear, but were mostly well-meaning box-ticking exercises with little real power. This reflected a wider culture of acknowledging youth as important, without actually involving us. On a practical level too, things like weekday events, remote sites only accessible by car, or not promoting opportunities on platforms young people actually use and in ways that resonate with them, made it hard to take part. This was made more difficult by the fact that young people needed to do vast amounts of this kind of unpaid volunteering to get their first job. The result is a sector that hasn’t genuinely nurtured the next generation of environmental stewards, and risks marginalising ethnic minority communities and young people from low income backgrounds who may not be in a position to take on unpaid, volunteering work.
Youngwilders exists to change the sector by accelerating UK nature recovery hand in hand with a new movement of engaged and empowered young people.
The core of our work is our youth-led nature recovery projects. They are ecological restoration projects of different sizes and habitat types, ranging from a small urban wildflower meadow about the size of a tennis court, to 30 acres of floodplain meadow, grassland and ancient woodland. They are united by the fact that maximised youth involvement is built into all of their recovery plans. The design, implementation and management of the projects are done entirely by local young people.
We run two programmes across our sites. Wild Stewards puts two young people per site into paid decision making roles to oversee and manage a site in recovery. Wayfinders is our series of ecological field skills weekends at our sites and provides a crucial opportunity for young people to learn about and teach other young people about essential hard skills in nature conservation and recovery work, such as surveying, species identification and trapping, all while building a sense of community and connectedness. Both of these meet a need supported by major environmental NGOs, government, and industry actors for practical nature recovery training skill-building opportunities. They also serve to build our generations’ capacity as environmental stewards - an essential part of what we exist to do.
Creativity and interdisciplinarity are core to Youngwilders' work toward our dual mission. Our Maple Farm Artist in Residence Programme is just wrapping its first year, and our first artist, Dee Sharma, is about to exhibit their Youngwilders piece at the Tate Modern as part of the Gathering Ground exhibition, a fitting conclusion to the bioaccoustic pieces and workshops they’ve executed as part of the programme. Our event series and zine Overgrowth is also based on the idea that creativity gets people interested in joining the movement, and also provides novel avenues of learning and connection to nature. If you’re based in the North, join us at Overgrowth North: our Youth Rewilding Summit in Northumberland this May.
No matter your background or understanding of nature, we’re here to make it as easy as possible to get involved, so please do! Fill in this quick form so we can add you to the channels most appropriate for you. We update our network with upcoming events via our Whatsapp community, seasonal newsletter and Instagram @youngwilders_ .
We look forward to seeing you at our next event :)
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