The Groundwork approach to 

neighborhood renewal

What California can learn from an innovative British environmental partnership organization

Ted Trzyna

CIPA Publication No. 104, 2001.  © CIPA 2001

Foreword

Following up its international project on California State Parks, the California Institute of Public Affairs convened a group to explore how California could learn from Groundwork, a highly successful British environmental partnership organization. Groundwork brings together the public, business, and voluntary sectors to make physical improvements to the environment, while serving social, economic, and educational needs. 

At the invitation of British Groundwork, a California delegation visited Britain in August 2000 to meet with Groundwork staff and visit project sites in the London, Birmingham, and Nottingham areas. Then, in September 2000, CIPA arranged for Groundwork's founding chief executive, John Davidson, to visit California to continue discussions on how the Groundwork concept might be adapted to California's particular circumstances. Meetings were held in the Los Angeles area, Sacramento, and San Francisco.

Subsequent conversations have focused on training and incorporating Groundwork's comprehensive approach into existing neighborhood renewal efforts in California.   

The first stages of this project were funded by the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority and the California Institute of Public Affairs, with in-kind support from Groundwork U.K, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy (a California state government agency), and the Senate Office of Research, California Legislature. Earlier work leading to this project was funded in part by the California Department of Parks and Recreation and IUCN - The World Conservation Union. 

This paper by is meant to stimulate discussion of how the Groundwork approach can be implemented in California. It does not necessarily reflect the views of funding agencies or cooperating organizations.

Summary

Groundwork, a nonprofit organization launched by the British government in 1982, shows what can be accomplished by a sophisticated environmental partnership program. It has an annual budget of $100 million and at any time is involved in over 3,000 projects.

Groundwork brings together the public, business, and voluntary sectors to make physical improvements to the environment, while serving social, economic, and educational needs. Its motto is "changing places, changing people."

It operates mainly in poorer communities and focuses on transforming contaminated and derelict land to public purposes.

Examples of physical projects include parks of many different kinds, green corridors, hiking and biking trails, restored waterways, playgrounds, school gardens, community centers, and even housing.

Examples of outreach include "Youth Works," which aims to reduce delinquency through hands-on environmental projects; educating students and the public about recycling and energy conservation; advising local businesses on compliance with environmental laws; and linking farms and urban schools for mutual benefit.

Groundwork’s forty-three local units take a whole-system approach to partnerships within a geographic area comprising one or several local jurisdictions. Each is governed by a local board. Together, their territories include a quarter of the country’s population.

Groundwork is highly skilled at putting together financial packages for its projects from a wide variety of public programs. Businesses provide more than a quarter of its income.

California has an impressive array of environmental groups and programs, but nothing quite like Groundwork. The Groundwork approach brings added value by:

– Taking a comprehensive approach to partnerships in a given area, linking physical projects to education, job training, and other social and economic-development goals;

– Providing special skills in leveraging funds, managing partnerships, involving the public, and engaging political, civic, and business leaders;

– Tackling projects that others would find hard to accomplish by themselves or through conventional partnerships, for reasons of scale, complexity, or politics;

– Focusing on contaminated and derelict land, particularly in disadvantaged communities.

Groundwork: a personal view

Groundwork, a nonprofit organization launched in 1982 by the Countryside Agency, Britain’s equivalent of the U.S. National Park Service, shows what can be achieved by a sophisticated environmental partnership program.

I’ve been following Groundwork since it started. I got to know its founder, John Davidson, from working with him on an international environmental commission. In 1995, he arranged for me to visit several local Groundwork operations in Britain and I had long talks with him and members of his staff. A year later, we went to Brazil together to promote the Groundwork idea. Then on a recent trip to Britain, I had more specific discussions with Davidson, now retired as chief executive, and Steve Grainger, Groundwork regional director for London and the Southeast, on how the Groundwork approach might be used in California.

Groundwork’s original purpose was to deal with abandoned industrial sites and played-out quarries in the urban fringe areas of the economically depressed Northwest of England. The conventional top-down methods weren’t working, so it was decided to try a more flexible approach. "We had to get into a dialogue with the people," Davidson explained to me; "For there to be sustained regeneration, we had to invent incentives."

Groundwork was set up to bring the public, business, and voluntary sectors together in clearly defined geographic areas to clean up contaminated sites or "brownfields," create parks and green corridors, build hiking and biking trails, and convert abandoned buildings to offices and housing.

Groundwork has been a great success. There are now forty-three Groundwork "trusts," as the local organizations are called, scattered over England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. They include a quarter of the country’s population. The areas in which Groundwork operates now span inner city and countryside, as well as urban fringe, but they are still mostly places where the quality of life is poor owing to a combination of economic, social, and environmental problems.

Overall, Groundwork has an annual budget of $100 million. It has over a thousand employees and attracts exceptionally bright and dedicated people. It is involved in over 3,000 projects at any given time. Last year, it worked with 4,550 businesses and involved 136,000 schoolchildren in environmental projects.

Groundwork now states its aim as regeneration of people and land. Although many of its projects still relate to parks, open space, and outdoor recreation, it is also heavily involved in such areas as environmental education and advising small businesses on compliance with environmental regulations. One program aims to reduce crime among teenagers by involving them in hands-on environmental improvement projects. Another program trains unemployed people for new "green collar" jobs in such fields as recycling.

There is nothing very unusual about these individual projects; they happen in many places. What is special about Groundwork is:

– The synergy it creates through partnerships and involvement of local people;

– A bottom-up way of doing things;

– A holistic approach that tackles environmental, economic, and social issues together;

– Eagerness to test new ideas;

– Ability to attract money from government, use it efficiently, and in many cases leverage it with large private contributions; and

– The sheer scale of its operations.

"What is different and exciting about Groundwork," one of its publications puts it, "is that it reaches out. It is not another group working only within its own band of members. It is a partnership that harnesses the private, public, and voluntary sectors. It is open to all: companies, local authorities, community groups, or individuals can be involved. Groundwork means the environment is for everyone."

The territories of local Groundwork trusts cover from one to several contiguous units of local government and typically have a few hundred thousand residents. Local trusts involve all the key actors in their areas and are run by boards that represent local governments, businesses, and civic groups. Their staff members "act as catalysts and enablers, providing a mix of inspiration, technical know-how, management, finance, and support to bring about local projects by local people."

Although Groundwork’s organization is decentralized, it has strong national and regional offices that maintain high-level contacts with government and major corporations, and facilitate sharing of skills among the local units.

Groundwork is highly skilled in developing financial packages for projects from a wide range of funding sources. These include government programs in such areas as employment training and neighborhood crime prevention, as well as environmental programs in the narrow sense.

Businesses contribute an impressive twenty-seven percent of Groundwork’s budget, $27 million this year. One reason for strong business support is that Groundwork builds long-term relationships with companies through consulting and neighborhood improvement. Another reason is that big corporations, rather than contributing to many small local projects, often prefer to fund national programs of a large, highly visible organization.

A local Groundwork trust: Kent Thames-side

The best way to understand how Groundwork operates is to look at one of its local trusts. I spent a day with the staff of Groundwork Kent Thames-side, which covers two boroughs, Dartford and Gravesham, in the county of Kent on the south side of the Thames River just below London. I was joined by my friend Bryn Green, professor of countryside management at the University of London’s Wye College.

The offices of the Kent trust are in the gatehouse of a palace built in the sixteenth century for King Henry VIII. The trust was started in 1990 and at the time we visited had twenty full-time and ten part-time staff and an annual budget of about $3.2 million. Its territory is one of the smallest of the forty-three Groundwork trusts, but it ranks second in terms of staff size.

The principal town in the area, Dartford, was once a country market town, then became industrialized with paper production, chalk mining for cement, and manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. Over the last thirty years, it has also become a dormitory for workers commuting to London.

Although there are lovely green hills, patches of old forest, and the marshes where Charles Dickens set Great Expectations, much of the environment is badly degraded. Depleted chalk pits cover large areas, some of them right next to housing tracts. There is contaminated soil, an abandoned factory for making asbestos brake lining, an old canal used to dump waste. A large percentage of the population is unemployed.

A hopeful development for these people that will also lead to new pressures on the environment is that the two boroughs are along the route of the Channel Tunnel link between London and France. A major international train station has been built in the heart of the area, and industry is expected to locate along the rail corridor.

In a recent year, the Kent trust was involved in 330 projects. These ranged from landscaping school grounds and producing access guides to open spaces, to rebuilding riverside trails and advising companies on improving their environmental management practices.

One attractive project that we visited is Beacon Wood Country Park. Originally, Beacon Wood was a forested hill, but the timber was cut for building. During the Napoleonic wars, the hill was one of a series from which beacons could be lit to alert London of an invasion attempt along the south coast. In 1885, the E.C. Gunpowder Company began manufacturing smokeless gunpowder on the site. By the 1930s, ownership of the land had changed, and over the next thirty years four million tons of clay were extracted. Mining stopped in 1964 and Beacon Wood slowly returned to nature, but relics of its industrial history can still be seen.

Beacon Wood is owned by Blue Circle Industries, a chalk and clay mining firm, and leased to the county. The Groundwork trust has been developing it as a country park since 1991 with the support of local government. The aim is to create a balance for nature conservation, education, and recreation. Wardens employed by Groundwork, helped by a corps of volunteers, protect the park and organize guided walks and children’s activities.

There are several other large-scale projects underway. One is removing contaminated infill from the old Thames and Medway Canal, recreating a two-mile-long water channel for recreation and nature conservation. Another is landscaping the major transport corridors through the area.

How does Groundwork Thames-side accomplish so much? First of all, money. The Kent trust takes advantage of one of the national Groundwork organization’s special skills: putting together financial packages. Money from national sources, both governmental and private, is deployed by Groundwork to add value to local funds, thereby increasing investment in the local economy. For most of its projects, the Kent trust is able to leverage government money with private contributions by a factor of around 1.7. In addition, the nonprofit trust has created a for-profit auxiliary ("trading company" in British parlance) to perform consulting tasks for businesses; the profits are plowed back into the trust’s core operations. The trust has a full-time director of development, a senior person responsible for raising funds.

Second, the Kent trust pays a lot of attention to people and local communities and their real needs. There is a "community link officer." Projects are founded on "comprehensive community partnerships." Staff members told me that they try hard to "draw out from people what they want from the environment": They "don’t come knocking at our door for help," I was told. "We need to identify opportunities and pull things together; we need to empower and enfranchise communities." Toward this end, staff put up displays in shopping centers, circulate questionnaires, knock on doors. It quickly became clear to me that words like "empowerment" were not buzzwords but criteria. Involving people is what Groundwork is about.

The third key to Kent Thames-side’s success is a creative and dedicated staff. On entering the offices of the Kent trust—and this was also the case in the other Groundwork offices I’ve visited—we immediately had a feeling of energy in the air, a sense of purpose, an eagerness to exchange ideas: what John Davidson calls the "Groundwork spark."

Some of the new concepts the Kent staff is promoting are creating new community woodlands, establishing a network of off-road bicycle paths, exhibiting striking examples of outdoor sculpture by local artists, and an ambitious plan to create an "interlinking network of green corridors and open land for people and wildlife, connecting between the towns and villages."

The Kent trust has six organizational members: the national Groundwork foundation, the county government, the two borough governments, and two large local industries: the aforementioned Blue Circle and a pharmaceutical company. It has long-term partnerships with another two hundred local organizations.

One of the ways the national Groundwork organization serves its local trusts is by setting up national "strategic partnerships." One of the most innovative of these is Youth Works, a partnership of Groundwork, a group called Crime Concern, and the Marks and Spencer department stores. Marks and Spencer helped secure major funding from a leading charity, the Leopold Muller Foundation, and provides a program manager and financial and legal support services.

Youth Works is a good example of how Groundwork links social, economic, and environmental objectives. Started in 1994, it aims to reduce crime among teenagers by involving them in hands-on environmental projects. It is focusing initially on public-housing projects in locations where youth "have bleak prospects and may easily become involved in anti-social behavior." Participants help build new facilities such as adventure playgrounds, gardens, bicycle tracks, and safe play areas for children. Local community advisory groups monitor progress. The hope is that through their participation in these projects, teenagers will gain new skills, develop self-confidence, and make fundamental changes in the direction of their lives. The expectation is that this will lead to better prospects of employment.

Examples of other national strategic partnerships are:

Investors in the Community: Postal workers helping communities transform local landscapes, sponsored by the Post Office.

Barclays Sitesavers: Converting abandoned and underused land into new community and recreation facilities, sponsored by Barclays Bank and two national environmental groups (The Wildlife Trust and the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers).

Play More: Improving playgrounds, sponsored by McDonald’s.

Safe Routes to School: Safe Roots for Communities: A community-based approach to planning and creating safe, healthy, and sustainable routes to schools in public-housing projects, sponsored by national and local government agencies, including the Metropolitan Police, and Sainsbury’s Supermarkets.

Ollie Recycles: Making recycling fun, sponsored by glass, steel, newsprint, and waste disposal firms. (Ollie is a cartoon character.)

London’s Waterways Partnership: Regenerating waterways throughout greater London, sponsored by various national and local government agencies and a water utility.

Esso Young Energy Savers: "Whole-school" involvement in energy education and conservation, sponsored by Esso (Exxon) and the national government.

Farmlink: Linking farms and urban schools for mutual benefit, sponsored by the ministry of agriculture.

Towns for People: Physical improvement projects adjacent to Sainsbury’s supermarkets, leading to wider town-center regeneration programs, sponsored by Sainsbury’s.

Waste Savers: Young people reducing waste in their communities and schools, sponsored by U.K. Waste.

Young Voices: Helping young people have a say in decisions about regenerating communities.

Trust for the Restoration of Derelict Land: Developing a national program that will act as developer and steward of post-industrial land, sponsored by landfill taxes and various private companies.

____________________________________

Further information on Groundwork U.K.

Groundwork’s Web site, www.groundwork.org.uk, has basic information and some interesting project documents. Groundwork's Changing Places program has a separate Web site, www.changingplaces.org.uk.  For more information, contact Groundwork U.K., 85-87 Cornwall Street, Birmingham B3 3BY, England; telephone from the U.S. 011-44-121-236-8565; fax 236-7356; e-mail info@groundwork.org.uk.

Learning from the Groundwork approach in California

Even though California has an impressive array of environmental programs, and has been a world pioneer in many facets of environmental management, it has nothing quite like Groundwork.

The Groundwork approach offers added value by:

– Taking a comprehensive, whole-system approach to partnerships in a given area, linking physical projects to education, job training, and other social and economic-development goals;

– Providing special skills in leveraging funds, managing partnerships, involving the public, and engaging political, civic, and business leaders;

– Focusing mainly on contaminated and derelict land, particularly in disadvantaged communities, and transforming it into parks and community facilities;

– Tackling projects that others would find hard to accomplish by themselves or through conventional partnerships, for reasons of scale, complexity, or politics.

The Groundwork approach could be used for:

– Creating parks of many different kinds;

– Developing playgrounds, playing fields, and community centers;

– Converting disused land or buildings into housing or nodes for neighborhood economic development;

– Involving at-risk youth in planning and carrying out projects that improve the neighborhood environment;

– Reaching out into neighborhoods to create a stronger sense of place and educate people about nature, local history, and resource conservation;

– Preserving and restoring remnant natural areas in cities, and making them accessible to the public;

– Regenerating rivers and streams;

– Landscaping school grounds and creating school gardens in ways that promote learning;

– Creating open-space corridors;

– Preserving historic and cultural sites;

– Planning, building, and maintaining recreational trails, both local and long-distance.

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