By Jack Durant, 31st July 2024
Youngwilders is a small non-profit doing youth-led nature recovery work. We work to accelerate the nature recovery of the UK and to involve young people in the process and movement. In the last two years, Youngwilders has moved from a much beloved but slow-moving hobby, to a fully-fledged non-profit with a phenomenal professional team, and, as of February 2024, an office space! This growth is, in no small part, due to EFN members and related funders donating to our work, but also because funders provided further support in the form of mentoring, advice, networking assistance and encouragement. Being part of EFN’s Green Fundraisers Forum (part of their ‘Supporting Environmental Groups’ programme) has also been vital in helping us develop and grow.
About Youngwilders
Our nature recovery and youth involvement mission couldn’t be more timely. The UK’s ecology is in the bottom 10% on Earth in terms of ecological intactness.1 To make this disturbing ecological picture even more worrisome, four in five young people, despite the fact they are going to be the primary victims of our current ecological and climate emergency, don’t feel they are being listened to on environmental issues.2
To tackle these core issues, the work of Youngwilders revolves around the concept of ‘youth-led nature recovery’. Through countless informal conversations and lots of surveying at our events, we find out what matters most to young people. Most notably our ‘youth rewilding manifesto’ was created from a discussion with 100 young people and was designed specifically for young people to ask for what they wanted. All this means we have a clear picture of what young nature lovers need from our landscape and the nature sector.
To realise young people’s visions, we’ve been developing and working on small-scale nature recovery projects across England and Wales. The 10 in our portfolio currently vary significantly in form, habitat type and degree of Youngwilders involvement, but all are bound by a commitment to nature recovery and involving young people in the process at every opportunity. These include a 30-acre rewilding project in Sussex, an urban wildflower meadow creation project in London, and a 20-acre woodland pasture and river restoration project in Essex (pictured below).
All our ecological interventions are conceived, designed and delivered by young people. By taking this approach, our projects are often slower than they might be otherwise, but the process allows us to provide young people with practical experience in leading and acting on nature recovery, a sense of community and well-being, an opportunity to feel more connected to nature and a chance to have real say in the direction of an active nature recovery project. This serves to support the ecological restoration of the UK while upskilling and energising the next generation of environmental stewards, so helping to secure our natural world’s protection and proliferation into the future.
How funders and EFN have helped us grow
We are very grateful for EFN’s support, which has helped to facilitate and strengthen our work. In setting up our organisation, we have sought advice in all directions – asking for support on everything from running an organisation, hiring, accounting to networking, fundraising and strategising. We needed support in all the things that our job requires which aren’t the actual nature recovery and getting young people involved in the process. There is a whole system of skills that facilitate the work we want to do, and we’ve acquired lots of these through kindly advice and mentorship from EFN members and affiliates.
For instance, when hiring, our instinct pre-advice was to find someone who was good enough and who we liked, and to put less resources into the process so as not to slow our work down too much elsewhere. With advice, we were encouraged to set our sights higher, to be much more thorough and methodical about it. Although a lengthier, more complex process, the end result has been a hire that we couldn’t be happier with and they have already given back the additional capacity the process took up and then some.
On the financial side, over half of our total donations so far have come from EFN members and related supporters. Our first ever major donation was from an EFN member, and they, and others in the EFN network, continue to introduce us to trusted friends and help us grow our supporter base.
Participating in EFN’s Green Fundraisers Forum has been transformative for Youngwilders at every stage of our development. This community is for anyone involved in environmental fundraising, and it gave us access to a supportive network of peers in other charities who have been valued advisors and collaborators. We were able to attend meetings hosted by EFN for this group, have access to resources, and to find out about funding opportunities. For example, we found out about The Funding Network’s live crowdfunding events, applied with the support of EFN, and alongside some indispensable non-financial support, raised £12,000 at the event – vital funding for us at an early stage of our development.
Over this recent period of professional development and growth, our productivity has risen sharply. In numbers, our team has grown from two to six, our number of young people engaged in person from 100 to over 500, and our total acreage in recovery from 30 to nearly 140.
Other achievements in this period include:
- One outdoor nature classroom built
- 10 youth-led nature recovery underway
- 7,000 trees planted
- 23 young people’s nature volunteer days
- Working in six counties
- Over 1km of ecologically connective hedgerow
- Two youth rewilding festivals
These numbers and activities are only part of the story. The momentum, goodwill and movement building they represent has been the true success of Youngwilders, and, though harder to quantify, the achievement that we’re most proud of.
“We hope that the story of Youngwilders shows funders that they can support youth-led organisations in particular with more than just financial support. The mentorship and advice Jack and his colleagues received enabled them to work more effectively and shows how sharing professional skills and knowledge can be invaluable for young environmental leaders or organisations early in their journey, coupled with the support that we are able to provide through our Supporting Environmental Groups programme”
Sophia Cooke, Supporting Environmental Groups Programme Lead, EFN
Looking to the future, Youngwilders are working on two major projects. Firstly, we are collaborating with Leverhulme Centre at Oxford University to crystallise our method into a guide that can be drawn from for any projects interested in providing opportunities for young people to lead and act on nature recovery. Secondly, we are developing and increasing the capacity of our Wild Stewards Programme – an experimental nature education programme that places inexperienced local young people into paid management positions on our projects. Our ultimate ambition is to have a Youngwilders or Youngwilders associated project within an hour of every interested young person in the country.
If you’re interested in hearing more about our work or supporting us in Youngwilders future developments, please reach out to me at jack@youngwilders.uk.
About the author
Jack studied philosophy at undergraduate level before completing a master’s at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability in Vancouver where he conducted social research into endocrine disrupting chemical pollution. During this time he and some friends started a passion project they called ‘Youngwilders’, which they formed to serve as a vessel and catalyst for youth-led nature recovery. In 2022, Youngwilders reached a point where Jack could work on it full-time and he has been full-time Youngwilding ever since. He now serves as Youngwilders Co-Director.
Sources
- Helen Phillips; Adriana De Palma; Ricardo E Gonzalez; Sara Contu et al. (2021). The Biodiversity Intactness Index – country, region and global-level summaries for the year 1970 to 2050 under various scenarios [Data set]. Natural History Museum. https://doi.org/10.5519/he1eqmg1 ↩︎
- ‘Youth in a changing climate’, by Fay Holland, Policy & Research Executive; Radya Syed, Policy & Research Trainee, Groundwork, November 2021, URL ↩︎
Keywords: biodiversity, conservation, effectiveness, fundraising, youth