Words by Smiley Team
A community interest company is appealing for funds to help turn their woodland into a place for learning and engagement in their community – and they need your help.
Duncan Moore is the founder and a director of Let’s Get Out C.I.C, a not for profit, community interest company based in Essex, which offers outdoor engagement activities.
In January 2021, the company secured use of an 11-acre woodland near Brentwood in Essex for use for our outdoor activities. “This woodland will be a fantastic area for people of all ages to come and engage with nature, we offer bushcraft sessions, forest schools, outdoor clubs, school visits,” says Duncan.
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“Everything we do is aimed towards engaging people with the natural world, giving them a better appreciation for the environment and improving their physical and mental wellbeing. Our company ethos is ‘everyone has the right to enjoy the outdoors, no matter what their background’.”
The idea to start Let’s Get Out C.I.C came from a few years of Duncan being a Scout leader, as well as supervising and assessing Duke of Edinburgh award expeditions.
“This led me to really see the benefits of what being outdoors has on people, especially the young, and in a world of dwindling accessible outdoor spaces, it is more important than ever to keep people and nature connected,” he says.
“The more people feel connected with nature, the more they respect it and this can only be of huge benefit for the future.”
The issue they have with the woodland is that they’ve had to split it into two phases. Phase one, they are using for their activities; and phase two has been damaged over the years by illegal motorised vehicles entering the woods and using it as a playground.
“They’ve destroyed the ecosystems of the woodland,” says Duncan. “So the aim of our ‘Revive the Woods’ project is to secure the woodland with suitable fencing to stop the damage caused by the illegal vehicles.
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“It’s also to restore the damaged areas within the woodland, allowing the ecosystem to recover, and we will then be in a position to expand our offerings of engaging people with nature at the site, which in turn will help many more people gain all the benefits that come with that. It will allow us to open up the woodland to a wider range of people, such as better disability access.”
Duncan adds: “The more support we get for our crowdfunder, the sooner we can turn around the woodland to be a great place for learning, engagement, but also a great place for humans and wildlife to co-exist in the area.”
You can support the crowdfunding campaign here – and get inspired. Is this something you could do in your own communities?
