Tag: Healthy Planet Healthy People awards

Edinburgh community projects receive grassroots funding for environmental and food initiatives

HEALTHY PLANET, HEALTHY PEOPLE AWARDS

  • Edinburgh-based community research projects receive up to £5000 funding
  • Projects based at Lauriston Farm Cooperative and the Scottish Youth Parliament
  • Part of Healthy Planet, Healthy People awards administered by Royal Society of Edinburgh and Williamson Trust

Community groups in Edinburgh have received a share of over £339K as part of the Healthy Planet, Healthy People project run by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Williamson Trust.

These community research funding awards enable and encourage knowledge exchange and collaborative research practices amongst and between local communities. The resulting findings and outputs are often scalable, producing valuable insights that can be used by similar groups working in other areas of the country and beyond.

The Scottish Youth Parliament (SYP) has been awarded almost £5000 to run a youth-led research programme into young people of colour’s safe access to green spaces. Through this project, theSYP aims to challenge the structural barriers faced by young people of colour when accessing natural spaces and provide evidence and tangible actions to decision-makers on what needs to change.

Daniela Onyewuenyi MSYP, board member of the Scottish Youth Parliament, said: “We are so lucky that in Scotland our natural landscape, no matter how big or small, is full of beauty.

“However, there are many barriers to access these spaces. This is why as a working group we decided to look at how young people of colour access those spaces or, on the contrary, why they feel they can’t.”

Rhyze Mushrooms, based at Lauriston, were awarded £5000 to test the performance of a variety of different composts that can be made using business waste, such as coffee chaff, agricultural waste and food scraps.

Working with local food businesses, the Rhyze Mushrooms team will explore how vermicomposting can prevent business waste from ending up in landfill by transforming it into high-quality soil improvers that enhance the health, yield, and nutrition of crops.

Vermicomposting is the process of using worms to consume organic waste and convert it into nutrient-rich compost.

Roxy Minter, member of the Rhyze cooperative, said: “Rhyze is a community-led, Edinburgh-based workers cooperative specialising in transforming waste into food and soil amendments.

“We are delighted to have been awarded this grant by the RSE and Williamson Trust. With this support, we will run a first-of-its-kind trial in our worm farm: to compare whether and how the castings produced by composting worms vary according to what they are fed. This will help us to understand whether some varieties of castings benefit particular crops over others.”

The Seeds of Change project will support the development of the Scottish Seed Hub; a co-operative of growers based at the Edinburgh Agroecology Co-operative CIC in Lauriston.

The group has been awarded £5000, and are aiming to increase the production and dissemination of locally-adapted, open-pollinated seeds grown using optimal agroecological practices.

By improving access to seeds suited to this country’s climate, the Hub hopes to enhance the biodiversity, and resilience of Scotland’s food system.

Lisa Houston of the Scottish Seed Hub said: “The Scottish Seed Hub has been created by a group of Scottish agroecological mixed vegetable farms to increase the growth, sharing and selling, of open pollinated bio-regionally adapted seeds.

“The founding growers are delighted to receive support through the Catalyst award to undertake a participatory action research project to help develop an organisational framework to guide the Scottish Seed Hub’s formalisation and growth to help us grow, and create lasting impact towards seed sovereignty in Scotland.”

A total of £5000 has been awarded to a Scotland-wide project “Conifers aren’t just for Christmas”, run by conifer expert Jennie Martin in collaboration with Scottish Forestry and the Royal Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh.

She will create a simple and accessible field guide to conifers in Scotland, hoping to kick-start a more conifer-literate society amongst forest school leaders, ecological surveyors, wilderness guides, and nature lovers alike.

Jennie Martin MSc FLS Ethnobotany, Conservation, Botanical Literacy, said: “Conifers are vital to our landscapes, ecosystems, and climate, yet they are often overlooked due to the challenge of identifying them.

“I am extremely grateful to The Royal Society of Edinburgh and The Williamson Trust for the Healthy Planet, Healthy People: Catalyst Award, which will enable the creation of an accessible field guide to common UK and Irish conifers.

“This grant will support people to become more conifer literate by recognising and understanding these remarkable trees more effectively.”

First initiated in 2023, Healthy Planet, Healthy People Awards are now offered under two strands – Catalyst Awards and Change Awards.  

Catalyst Awards are designed to enable community-led research across any discipline that promotes the health of individuals by fostering healthy communities, environments, and food quality and supply. These awards offer up to £5000 to pilot a project. This year a total of £99,250 has been awarded to 20 projects across Scotland.

Change Awards are designed to support standout projects – that previously received Catalyst funding – with major funding to grow and scale their work. This year four projects in the Orkney islands, Isle of Lewis, Cupar and Kirkcaldy have been awarded a total of £240,217 between them.

Professor David Salt FRSE, Chair of the Williamson Trust, said: “As this community-led work continues to grow there can be no doubt communities across Scotland can build local solutions to ongoing challenges to our environment, our communities and our food.

This round we have projects spanning seed saving, community growing, fermentation and composting to coppicing, tree identification, accessing green space, transhumance and repair café. An amazing array of projects.

“The Trust hopes that with these new awards we continue to build a movement of committed people to find solutions to the challenges faced by local communities, and that these solutions can have wider impact.”

Royal Society of Edinburgh Vice President, Research, Professor Anne Anderson OBE FRSE added: “This marks the third successful round of Healthy Planet, Healthy People: Catalyst Awards, which were introduced to expand the type of research the RSE supports.

“We are also very pleased to announce the first recipients of the Healthy Planet, Healthy People: Change Awards; a new development of the Healthy Planet, Healthy People Programme, which extends the support offered to grassroots groups and demonstrates the Society’s commitment to empowering community-driven research focused on positively impacting sustainability, health, and community resilience.

“I congratulate all those awarded under both schemes, and I look forward to following their progress and achievements over the coming year.”

Three local projects backed by RSE and Williamson Trust

Three Edinburgh-based community projects have been awarded a total of more than £14,000 in research funding by the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) and Williamson Trust to promote healthy living.

Lauriston Farm and local environmental artist Natalie Taylor will benefit from a share of the funding pot, along with Leith-based Earth in Common.

Lauriston Farm, run by a workers’ cooperative, is dedicated to sustainable food production, biodiversity, and community. They will use their award of £4550 to develop a sustainable alternative to chemical fertilisers using Aerated Compost Teas, a process of mixing compost with water and then introducing oxygen into the mixture. 

Despite their potential, practical guidance for integrating compost teas into commercial market gardens and the potential benefits remains limited. The project is aiming to bridge that gap by refining recipes and protocols to make knowledge of Aerated Compost Teas production accessible and effective for both commercial growers and people at home.

Grower and Coop Director Jossie Ellis said: “This funding will enable us to advance our experiments using Aerated Compost Teas in the Market Garden, which will help to improve soil health, crop resilience, and sustainable food production.

“With this support, we hope to refine our methodologies, share findings with growers, and contribute to a more regenerative food system.”

Environmental artist Natalie Taylor has received £4500 for her Scran Fir Bees project to extend a series of existing public space artworks incorporating wildflowers to provide nectar-rich habitats and food sources for pollinators.

Her long-term vision is that these artworks, using large-scale text cut into the landscape, will join up to eventually form a bee corridor across the North of Edinburgh.

Natalie Taylor said: “I am so pleased to be able to work alongside local communities to design, develop and implement the new environmental artwork, sharing skills in meadow maintenance and strategic seeding to increase local biodiversity.

“Through fun, creative workshops, I will highlight the importance of our relationship with insect pollinators, which contribute vital services to roughly one-third of our food. I see this creative action for biodiversity as really important at the moment due to the ongoing crisis in pollinator populations, especially in urban environments such as Edinburgh where there are so many natural spaces where we can potentially help them.”

The Edinburgh projects are among 16 innovative community-led research projects across Scotland to receive funding from the RSE and the Williamson Trust.

A total of £73,625 has been given to a range of creative projects to foster healthy communities as part of the Healthy Planet, Healthy People awards.

Meanwhile, Earth in Common, based at Leith Community Croft, which includes a market garden, an orchard, and a community area shared by over 100 growers, has been awarded £5000.

The Croft is situated on Common Good land inspired by the Gaelic concept of dùthchas – the deep-rooted connection between people and the land.

They will use the funding to gather data on cultivated and wild plants and pollinators, which will help formulate strategies for biodiversity conservation and inform a guidance manual for urban green spaces across Scotland.

Evie Murray, CEO of Earth in Common, said: “This award will boost our mission to demonstrate that urban crofts, such as our model Leith Community Croft, can effectively address multiple societal and environmental issues. With its orchard, wild areas, market garden and unique system of group-shared food-growing plots, it has already been shown to foster great biodiversity.

“This will empower our ‘Crofters’ – local residents – to develop citizen-science skills to monitor and further increase biodiversity. This should benefit them as individuals and foster pride and engagement in land stewardship in densely populated Leith.

“We hope that the methodology we collectively develop will be widely shared and can have a significant positive impact on nature and people’s relationship with it across Scotland.”

This is the second year of the awards, generously funded by the Williamson Trust, a charitable organisation. The strength of the applications in the second round of the funding programme resulted in four additional projects being awarded financial support.

Professor David E Salt FRSE, Chair of the Williamson Trust, said: “This year, we again have an amazing diversity of projects, from dolphins, bees, seeds, orchards, woodlands and lochs to food banks, composting, urban crofts and coffee shops. We truly look to invest in hope and the power of ideas wherever they arise.

“The trustees at the Williamson Trust are excited to fund 16 great community-led projects from across Scotland.

“Applications to the Healthy Planet, Healthy People Community-led Research Awards continue to grow, demonstrating the strong desire of communities in Scotland to develop local solutions to the ongoing global challenges to our environment, our communities and our food.

“The Trust hopes that these locally focused projects can find solutions to the challenges the local communities face and that these solutions can also have wider application.”

RSE Vice President, Research, Professor Anne Anderson OBE FRSE, commented: “This marks the second round of RSE ‘Healthy Planet, Healthy People’: Community-led Research Awards, which were introduced to expand the Society’s range of awards and the type of research we support.

“The health of people and the environment are closely connected, and I hope that these awards will strengthen these innovative research groups and drive positive change in both areas. I look forward to following their progress and achievements over the coming year.”