Photo courtesy of Core Landscapes

Team Challenges can be a great way for community partners to get an extra hand in completing maintenance, gardening, painting or other types of tasks. When a company shows their interest in doing a team challenge, ELBA will advertise a selection of suitable volunteering options by sharing a description of what the different charities do and the tasks that will be tackled during the team challenge day.

During the winter months, outdoor sites may find difficulties in acquiring teams, due to which important tasks may be put on hold. We spoke to Nemone from Core Landscapes to find out how her outdoor community garden responds to this dip and how changing the description of the volunteering activity may help in maximising the number of volunteers during the winter months.

What does Core Landscapes do?
Core Landscapes – Community garden + plant nursery ‘transforming meanwhile sites to promote positive mental health and wellbeing for all.’

Core Landscapes is an award-winning mental health project that aims to improve people’s mental and physical wellbeing through horticulture. It opens up previously inaccessible sites to create green havens for individuals and the wider local community. The project moved from its Whitechapel site earlier this year to a new roof garden in Hackney next to, and part of, Core ARTS. This new garden-in-the-sky houses an orchard, plant nursery, teaching space, plus food and flower growing areas, all container grown – from Rowan trees to salad leaves. Embracing upcycling and recycling this imaginative project showcases that gardens or green spaces can be created anywhere anyhow. Core Landscapes’ sustainable and organic community gardens are peaceful, inspirational social spaces for the local community to enjoy and learn from. The gardens are looked after by committed teams of volunteers and people referred to the project by health and social care clinicians, facilitated by experienced and passionate staff – but it also relies on CSR engagement for support.

People come to learn about horticulture, meet others and give something back to the local community and in doing so improve their own mental and physical health. Core Landscapes also offers support to other community growing projects and is part of the mental health charity Core Arts (promoting positive mental health through creative learning.)

What might a typical team challenge day look like at Core Landscapes?
A typical team challenge day will vary depending on the time of year and what needs to be done, but whatever the season there are a range of activities on offer, such as carpentry and construction tasks, painting, horticultural based tasks and design/trouble-shooting objectives. We always aim for the days to have a range of tasks with as much staff input as possible with plenty of planning beforehand.

We work with both large and small groups and any training needed by CSR volunteers is given on the day by experienced staff.

Currently Core Landscapes is settling into new spaces in Hackney having relocated from Whitechapel earlier this year so there are plenty of creative tasks for CSR teams to get involved with developing our new roof garden hub and landscaping Core Arts’ members garden.

Corporate feedback is enthusiastically positive from a wide variety of companies. People particularly enjoy learning new skills in beautiful outdoor spaces, the teamwork challenges, the mental respite from an office environment and knowing they are helping to support a project with a large impact in the local community and beyond.

By engaging in our innovative multi award-winning project they are also helping to develop other community garden spaces in the city that help people recover from and manage mental ill health, as Core Landscapes is able to offer peer to peer support for other community projects in troubleshooting their own or discussing ideas.

We know that it can be harder to encourage teams of volunteers in the cold winter months. Do you notice any difference in popularity for your volunteering days according to the time of year and the description of the activity?
There are fewer groups coming forward during the winter generally – the ones that do come are often up for a real challenge physically, that can be very useful!

Does changing the description of the activity affect your workload?
The winter activities generally require more thought to work out as we really do need to make sure people are active, and always dry and warm. We have limited indoor space so we need to get this bit right.

It is occasionally tricky to manage expectations too – sometimes people forget they are primarily there to support the charity and not just to learn new and useful skills. It’s often a balancing act but we have been doing it for many years now so mostly get it right! The teams we work with are amazingly enthusiastic and hardworking, bringing energy and support to our project in huge waves.

Any other comments?
We rely on CSR engagement as one of our self-generated income streams and the energy and physical support business volunteers bring to the project are invaluable. We are very grateful to all our wonderful CSR volunteers over the years. Many come back time after time.

It’s great working with ELBA too – the partnership takes a lot of the paperwork and sourcing CSR teams away from project staff better suited to teaching horticultural skills and being outdoors!

If you have any questions or inspiring ideas on how to get the most out of your volunteering opportunities during the winter, please get in touch with amadiora.emechete@elba-1.org.uk.