Sometimes in life you realise you are growing up, when you can pass your knowledge onto younger people.
I am only 22 but I am so happy to be sharing my wildlife experience with others of my generation who are taking their first steps into nature. They don’t yet realise how this experience could change their life in unbelievable and exciting ways.
I am a Senior Nature and Wellbeing volunteer on an ecotherapy project called Dirtworks, having worked with the LWT since I was 16.
The Fairy Woodland at Brockholes
An example of our most recent work is the amazing transformation that we have made Fairy Woods in Brockholes, which you may have noticed when walking through. My team of young people, who come from all across Lancashire, help to develop what was once an overgrown and uncared for sector of the wood into an inviting vibrant home for nature and put in place a professional-looking seating area for families.
What I most enjoy about being a volunteer is connecting with my participants through the work we do on a Saturday. An example of this is seeing them develop, from once being shy and unsure to developing into the leaders of tomorrow. I love to hear about their week and what is going on in their world and what life is like as teenager nowadays and how it’s totally different from my past experiences.
Dirtworks is not like any other youth programme and has grown some of the best volunteers and the best staff members. The project encourages the youth of Lancashire to form a deeper connection to nature through the five ways to wellbeing (connect, learn, be active, take notice, give back).
Dirtworks has a dedicated team of volunteers with some participating for up to five years.
The project has also produced three Lancashire Wildlife Trust Youth Council members and a full-time trainee in Wigan. Dirtworks also has encouraged young people to seek out an environmental education at Myerscough College, studying courses like animal management and land and wildlife management.
This life-changing project has also encouraged young people to have a keen interest in ecology and conservation that the wildlife trust delivers.
It is my belief that this project has worked and will work for many years because of the one enormous difference from any other project in the whole trust - our participants. An example of one of the brilliant participants that Dirtworks can produce is Julia Dickinson. Julia was once a quite shy and unconfident person, since her time on the project she has develop from a participant into a Senior Nature and Wellbeing volunteer and now she has bagged a job working for the Lancashire Wildlife Trust on the landscape recovery team.
What we have in these young people is the opportunity to mould them into valued and respected members of society who have such valued qualities such as self-confidence, honesty, boldness, freedom, trust, team spirit, modesty, and responsibility. All those qualities that where listed are the core quality of great men and women that make the doctors, conservationist, ecologist, and the leaders of the years ahead.
