Long Mead Foundation and NRN Achieve 'Strategic Project' Status in Oxfordshire's Local Nature Recovery Strategy
Restoration and Research Collaboration: Green hay collection on Long Mead provides invertebrate study for Oxford Brookes Masters Students. Photo - Catriona Bass
Long Mead Foundation and Nature Recovery Network are delighted to have been selected as one of 15 “Strategic Projects” to drive Oxfordshire’s Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS) with its Thames Valley Wildflower Meadow Restoration Project.
We are one of only two community-driven projects selected, the others are led by national or regional NGOs.
Oxfordshire’s LNRS describes these ‘high quality strategic projects’ as:
Stand out strategic projects [that] would not only enhance nature in an area, but would show how their work would also offer significant ecosystem services or wider benefits for people such as opportunities to interact with nature, improve local wellbeing, health, and build local resilience to the impacts of climate change or other pressures on biodiversity. Such projects have great potential to bring about broader societal and economic gains, such as improved quality of life, social equity, and economic benefits for local businesses.
It is a testament to our broad community’s amazing collective efforts to come together to research and restore our local nature - and to share widely the health and well-being benefits that this work brings to all of us, including to those in our network with learning disabilities and autism and with physical and mental health challenges. It is also proof of the efficacy of a bottom-up network for scaling up nature recovery efforts.
We wouldn’t be here without the growing number of committed local experts and enthusiasts who freely give their time or without the amazing connecting up of our local community organisations, local NGOs, local funders, local councillors, local schools and local businesses – including our plant propagation partners FarmAbility and Bridewell Gardens and our landowners and restoration partners, including Oxford Preservation Trust, Smiths of Bletchingdon, Christchurch College, Merton College, Oxford University Parks and Pinkhill Farm.
Ours are not tick-box partnerships but real, long-term professional and social relationships forged over many years. We look forward to many more years doing what we can together to protect and restore the fragile world around us.