1.  INTRODUCTION

In the United Kingdom, the agency responsible for national parks and countryside management was asked by the government in the early 1980s to do something about abandoned industrial sites and played-out quarries in the urban fringe areas of the economically depressed Northwest of England. Conventional top-down approaches didn’t work, so it was decided to take a more flexible approach. An “environmental partnership” NGO called Groundwork was set up to bring the public, business, and voluntary sectors together in clearly defined geographic areas to clean up contaminated sites, create parks and green corridors, build hiking and biking trails, and convert abandoned buildings to offices and housing. 

Groundwork is widely regarded as an emphatic success. Now, almost fifty local Groundwork “trusts,” as the local organizations are called, exist in the UK.  The territories of these trusts cover from one to several contiguous units of local government (for example, a county or one or more boroughs) and typically have a few hundred thousand residents. They involve all the key actors in their areas and are run by boards that represent local governments, businesses, and civic groups. Together, they include more than a quarter of the country’s population. The areas in which they operate now span inner city and countryside, as well as urban fringe, but they are still 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 some ₤95 million and over 2,000 employees. In 2004, it was involved in over 4,500 projects; encouraged volunteers to give more than 350,000 days of their time to improve their neighborhoods; provided 57,000 weeks worth of training; created 2,500 jobs; improved 780 hectares of land; and worked with 5,500 businesses and 3,700 schools.  

Groundwork has become a federation of local trusts. Operation of the trusts is supported by national and regional offices. The federation and the trusts work closely with, and receive support from, all levels of government. They also receive support from businesses, the European Union, the National Lottery, and charitable foundations.

In addition, there are several Groundwork projects on the European continent, and the Groundwork approach has been adopted in Japan and in the United States, where the U.S. National Park Service is supporting a growing number of trusts.

Groundwork UK is the lead partner in a major European Union project called Sustainable and Accessible Urban Landscapes (SAUL).  This project involves partners from six metropolitan regions: London; Amsterdam; Luxembourg; and the Rhein-Ruhr, Frankfurt/Rhein-Main, and Saarland regions of Germany. SAUL addresses “the role of socially inclusive urban spaces on the sustainable development of metropolitan regions together with regional identity, planning through partnerships, and the transnational value of the ‘learning region’ approach (Groundwork 2005).” 

2.  “CHANGING PLACES, CHANGING LIVES”

Groundwork’s motto is “Changing Places, Changing Lives.” Its purpose is to “improve the quality of the local environment, the lives of local people, and the success of local businesses in areas in need of investment and support.” Although many of its projects still relate to parks, open space, and outdoor recreation, it is now organized around six broad themes:

Communities: Building stronger neighborhoods. The focus here is on improving the quality of life for people living in neighborhoods “viewed by many as disadvantaged.” “We help people improve the appearance of their streets, parks, and estates but also encourage them to lead healthier lifestyles, get to know other people in their area, or work with their neighbors to reduce antisocial behavior and the fear of crime.” An example of a Groundwork initiative within this theme is its Safer Communities program, which installs lighting, fencing, secure locks, and smoke and burglar alarms on properties, and sets up local groups to improve relations between different age groups.

Land: Reconnecting people with their surroundings. “We aim to create landscapes that promote better health and biodiversity and encourage more sustainable living, for example, through renewable energy or local food production.” An example is extensive improvement of the Alban Way, a 10.5-km cycle route in Hertfordshire, north of London, including construction of a new bridge, installation of new signs, and creation of a “friends” group to organize activities and monitor maintenance of the route.

Employment: Training for work and stimulating enterprise. “We help people who are unemployed develop their skills and experience by working on regeneration projects in their own neighborhoods, including environmental training.” Many Groundwork trusts do this by setting up “intermediate labor markets” that pay apprentices a wage while they work on such activities as renovating run-down houses.

Education: Learning, citizenship, and sustainability. “We work with children in and out of school and with adults to illustrate how our individual actions can make a difference to our immediate surroundings and the global environment.” Among various initiatives is a program for schoolchildren across England called “Our Place, Our Future,” that helps them learn about their local environment. In Kent, to the Southeast of London, young people have focused on food production and the decline of apple orchards.     

Business: Integrating the economy and the environment. “We help businesses and other organizations stay competitive and successful by taking a more responsible attitude toward the environment and their local community.” This includes training, advice, reviews, and audits.

Youth: Realizing young people’s potential. “We involve young people in a range of activities designed to bring them into contact with other people in their community and to increase their own confidence and self-esteem. Our aim is to get young people interested in the place where they live and to help them play a full and active part in society.” In Coventry, for instance, a partnership including the local Groundwork trust helped a group of young people make a short film about their neighborhood, and persuade an electricity company to fund a decorative mural on the drab concrete wall of one of its facilities (Groundwork 2005).

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 partnerships is Youth Works, an alliance of Groundwork, a group called Crime Concern, and the Marks and Spencer department stores. Started in 1994, it aims to reduce crime among teenagers in specifically targeted “deprived neighborhoods” by, among other things, involving them in hands-on environmental projects. Participants help build new facilities such as 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 (YW 2005).

Another such strategic partnership is Barclays SiteSavers, supported by a major bank and cosponsored by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and two national environmental groups, The Wildlife Trust and the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers. Started in 1996, it helps local citizens “take action to transform derelict eyesores on their doorstep into dynamic places for play, education, relaxation, and fun.” Such places range from community gardens to skate parks. As of 2004, more than 600 such projects have been completed (BSS 2005).

3.  GROUNDWORK ON THE GROUND:  A PERSONAL VIEW

I’ve been following Groundwork since it started. I knew its cofounder and former Chief Executive, John Davidson, from serving with him on a commission of IUCN - The World Conservation Union. In 1995, John 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. In 2000, I took a California delegation to Britain to meet with Groundwork staff and visit project sites, and then John visited California to continue discussions on how the Groundwork concept might be adapted to California’s particular circumstances. There were more visits and more meetings that – with many others involved – eventually led to plans for The Urban Imperative workshop, in which John had a key role.

The best way to understand how Groundwork operates is to look at one of its local trusts. A few years ago, 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, then professor of countryside management at the University of London.

 

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 now has around twenty staff. Its territory is one of the smallest of the fifty or so Groundwork trusts, but is one of the largest 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 forty 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 local residents 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 locating along the rail corridor.

 

The Kent trust is involved in projects ranging 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 was 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 substantial private contributions. 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 that words like “empowerment” were not buzzwords but criteria. Involving people is what Groundwork is about.

 

The third key to Kent Thames-side’s accomplishments 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.”

4.  INGREDIENTS OF SUCCESS 

There is nothing very unusual about the individual projects mentioned above; 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 says, “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.”

 

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. Groundwork also has substantial support from businesses. One reason for this 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 that has a reputation of delivering what it promises.

But John Davidson believes the main ingredient of Groundwork’s success is serving the needs of local communities as those needs are expressed by the people who live there. When he and others started Groundwork over twenty years ago, they found conventional top-down methods didn’t work.

“We had to get into a dialogue with people,” he told me. “For there to be sustained regeneration, we had to invent incentives.” Such “participatory planning” is much more likely to produce results, he says, but is much more demanding than the usual kind. In fact, some newly hired employees trained in the design professions leave Groundwork after a short time because they don’t like the “people work” required.

Robin Mabey, a national figure in the organization who has chaired Groundwork Camden & Islington, a Groundwork trust that serves a vibrant and ethnically diverse area of central London which includes wealth and poverty and everything in between, observes from his experience that:

• In inner-city areas, the environment is neutral ground, “an issue that brings people together, an issue around which people can connect with each other,” whether the agenda is nature or refurbishment of structures;

• When projects in crime-plagued areas are planned by local residents, they are not vandalized because they are protected by residents who have a sense of possession and pride about their projects (Maybey 2002).

John Davidson says he “discovered that if you go into poor neighborhoods with unemployment, drugs, and violence it is hard to capture the minds of people there for parks and recreation. There are other priorities on their list. We need to recognize what people’s needs are. We must listen and respond in appropriate ways. Even in the most difficult areas, we can win the hearts and minds of people with that recognition in mind."

The key, he says, is to “achieve social and economic benefits at the same time as achieving conservation benefits.” People then see conservation as part of a “cycle of renewal.”

This paper is based on (a) a continuing conversation with Groundwork cofounder and former Chief Executive John Davidson that started seriously around 1995 and has since gone on not only in Britain but in such places as Brazil, California, South Africa, and Thailand; (b) meetings with current Chief Executive Tony Hawkhead and other senior Groundwork UK staff; (c) visits to several Groundwork trust offices and project sites in the UK, where I had opportunities to talk with involved and affected local citizens, as well as staff; and (d) a previous paper I wrote on Groundwork for the California state government (Trzyna 2001).

5.  REFERENCES

BSS. 2005. “Barclays SiteSavers.” Barclays SiteSavers, http://www.Barclays-sitesavers.org.uk.

Groundwork. 2005. “Groundwork: Changing Places, Changing Lives.” Groundwork UK, http://www.groundwork.org.uk.

Maybey, Robin. 2002. Interview with author. London, 2002.   

Trzyna, Ted. 2001. “The Groundwork Approach to Neighborhood Renewal.” California Institute of Public Affairs, www.InterEnvironment.org/cipa/groundwork.htm.

YW. 2005.  “Youth Works: Brighter Futures for Young People.” Youth Works, http://www.youth-works.com.