Join me for the first in a series of Working Party!* conservation events that combine hands-on-in-around-the-soil volunteering with critical conversations around the culture of volunteering and grassroots stewardship in England. The first is programmed to coincide with the Urban Tree Festival 2025, an initiative of CPRE and The Woodland Trust.
Meet us at Hendon Tiny Orchard - a tiny by name, tiny by nature patch of soily resistance somewhere between The Claddagh Ring pub, Middlesex University and the Hendon Bagel Bakery… We’ll talk about the importance of ‘tiny orchards’ for biodiversity, food sovereignty and community - and the hard work of making it happen. The majority of the session will be dedicated to helping with tasks like fence weaving, watering and planting fuelled by lots of par-tea and cake of course! You’ll also have the opportunity to contribute a page to an artist fanzine.
This is the first in a series of critical conversations-with-conservation that I am holding across London’s diverse ecological spaces. These sessions are both a celebration of the grassroots organisations seeding the grass roots but also a moment to reflect on the reliance and (burden of) volunteer labour that the sustenance and maintenance of our green-blue-brown-pink-yellow spaces have become dependent upon amongst strained budgets and increasing privatisation. We’ll ask - who gets to volunteer and what might be a barrier or exclusion? We will take time to acknowledge that volunteering is a resource-heavy endeavour of physical, emotional and intellectual labour and can become another form of exclusion - who has time to spare? who can afford the bus fare? who feels safe or welcome? who can do the physical labour?
*Volunteer sessions in nature are often called “Working Parties”.
