Endangered Plants Index Degree Project

Update: 18/01/22:

The petition is going pretty well, considering I haven’t pushed it so much yet. I am starting to use it when emailing people about the project (so other organisations, etc., and I will return to pushing it shortly, once I have git a bit further with my project.) However, I am already on 192 signatures, which I am happy with!

After talking to Amy, I decided that one of the most key things for me to do, would be to create and launch a petition about rewilding in order to build my campaign around that. Having a petition will give me an extra something to show to organisations and people that I want to work with, and is something that I can take around and campaign in person with as well.

The demand of my petition is: “Rewild All Brownfield and Common Land in England” – I chose this for a variety of reasons:

1. England is a narrowed and more achievable goal than the whole of the UK – and I can act on rewilding England locally, myself as well.
2. Using brownfield sites seems to be the best use of the land – as often brownfield sites are left empty for nature to reclaim anyway. Rewilding them means giving nature a helping hand.
3. Common land is land not owned by anyone – so it is land that can be rewilded easily and without having to contact land owners.

So far, I have shared the petition on a few platforms – including my activism instagram @emilykatherineknock and the project instagram @endangeredplantindex, and have collected 60 signatures. My goal is reach 100 signatures before I start reaching out to other organisations about my project, as it is a good number to be able to work from and it shows that I am serious and dedicated to the project, which will make them more likely to work with me. Below is a screenshot of my petition on Change.org, the link to which is here

In order to promote it, I created a short, one minute video explaining why I have made the petition and asking people to sign it. This was fun to do, as I hadn’t made this type of reel for quite a while, and it felt good to be creating something which is based on a direct action again, as I have taken a bit of a step back from FFF England for the moment to focus on my degree. I did find it challenging to learn the whole script however, and to be able to deliver it with strength and clarity – especially as my voice was still suffering from having a cold. However, I am very pleased with the final effect, as it is powerful, and has had quite a bit of interaction with online, which is positive. The video can be found here.

In the past few weeks, I have been working hard on the rewilding side of the project – building up a platform that I will be able to start doing in-person campaigning with in the new year. As I mentioned previously, I created an instagram account, where I would be able to showcase my project and provide a platform for creating change as well.

The main thing I have been focussing on is creating content to share on the instagram – largely based around the petition that I have launched, as creating the petition gives me a perfect launch point to campaign around. My goal was to reach 100 signatures before I started campaigning in person, which I have now reached (!!), and so after the Christmas holidays, I will be able to start campaigning in earnest. My plan is to start very locally, campaigning at my local council – having meetings with them and seeing if we are able to create some wilder spaces within the local environment. However, at the same time, I am planning on also reaching out to a wider group of people and organisations – therefore creating both a local, on the ground, and a further reaching section to my project. The below list are a few of the people and organisations who I want to contact:

Initially, I will contact them via email, and then see if I can set up zoom calls and meetings with them, in order to try and create connections there, which I can utilise in the project. I have written a draft of the email, which I am currently waiting to have someone read through for me and check that it is good to send (gets my point across clearly and concisely), and then I will start sending emails out and gaining traction on the project!

Additionally, I have also been working hard on the instagram, trying to create content for it every day, in order to keep people interested and to build up a following, but I will expand more on this in a later post.

The above screenshot shows the initial plan that I have made for my project – something that is easily actionable and which is also effective and manageable. I am really pleased with the steps that I have outlined, and will start to work on them right away – focussing initially on the Social and Publicity and Petition sides, as these will allow me to look further and start to reach out to other organisations, once I have a platform to work from.

I have decided that my petition will be to Rewild All Brownfield and Common Land in England – as this is a broad petition which should gain much traction from a wide range of people and organisations, as well as being something that is actually, fairly easy to achieve – it just requires some political and public will, which is what my project aims to create. As such, I have started to look into different land ownership in the UK (in the following example, I have focussed the maps on Ipswich, as that is my immediate locality), in order to see what is common land, and where we could start to rewind without needing any landowner permission. Although I haven’t yet been able to find that out yet, I have discovered who a few local landowners are and how much the land sold for, thanks to the Who Owns England and Private Eye Land Ownership maps:

Finding out which land we are able to rewind without permission is going to take quite a lot of research, and I don’t have the time to do that at the moment. However, I will start to formulate the petition (using either Change.org (as I have used this before), Gov.co.uk or 38 Degrees) and work on content for the instagram page, working out what types of media I want to publish also – photos, infographics, reels, videos, etc.

Image Sources:

Who Owns England. (N.D) Who Owns England Map. [Screenshot] Available at: http://map.whoownsengland.org (accessed: 15 December 2021)

Private Eye. (2021) Selling England (And Wales) By the Pound. [Screenshot] Available at: https://private-eye.co.uk/registry (accessed: 15 December 2021)

Following on from my call with Amy yesterday, I have decided to work on starting and planning my project today.

The first step that I have taken, is to start an instagram page for the rewilding project, where I will put information about both sides of the project, in order to make the link between them really clear and not to have them as two completely disparate entities. I have chosen (rather than creating a completely new one), to reuse one that I already had – The Question Mark Project one that I started in professional practice last year, as it meant that I didn’t have to go through the rigmarole of setting a new one up, and that I already have a few followers to work from.

I have used the Endangered Plants Index logo that I designed earlier in the project as the logo for the instagram account as well (This may change as the account progresses, but for now it is what I am going with), although I have edited it slightly for this side of the project (as you can see below):

Adding the word “rewilding” helps focus the outer view of the project and makes it really obvious what the project is about from the off – which is really important, as the easier something is to understand and engage with, the more people will engage and interact with it. I chose to use the colour green, as it is symbolic of plants, obviously, but also has many connotations with the climate movement and things being “green” (another word for being environmentally friendly”. I am hoping that the fact that I have also used a ‘handwriting’ style font will make people feel less daunted by the project and more likely to interact with it – as not only is the ‘handwriting style’ very popular at the moment in marketing, but it also feels more handmade and community based, and more like something that people would want to be involved in.

I changed the name of the instagram to @endangeredplantindex – which although it doesn’t mention the rewilding aspect, still very quickly and easily conveys the aim of my project – as well as being very easily searchable (the handle has no additional characters which could complicate people finding the account). Below is a screenshot of what I have set up so far:

I am pleased with how it looks, and I look forward to starting to grow the project. The link to the instagram is here

Yesterday I had a really helpful conversation on zoom with Amy Meek from the charity and organisation Kids Against Plastic (their instagram), where she offered a lot of advice and information to me about how she and her sister started Kids Against Plastic, and how I can go about starting and growing my Rewilding project.

During the call, I was able to ask Amy the biggest questions I had about starting up an initiative which I really hope will grow and expand to be on at least a similar scale as theirs is. One of my key (and first) focuses was funding, and where they got their funding from in order to grow their community and become the successful organisation they are now. Their funding was much more ‘organic’ than I had envisaged, and grew slowly over time, and wasn’t actually one of the first things that they looked into. But she was able to recommend a few locations to me (and agreed with the Patreon account idea), such as Geovation, who can provide funding for organisations, as well as mentoring for how to get the most out of the funding that you get and to make your organisation as effective as it can be. Additionally, she recommended achieving charity/Not for Profit/NGO status, as this makes people more willing to donate to your campaigns etc. Finally, she also recommended Investors in Community, through which you can connect and work with businesses and organisations in your local area, and they are able to donate, volunteer, and volunteer hours or skills towards your project, and helps it grow in your local community.

The importance of investing in the local community was also something that she stressed, as that is something that they focus on, and helps to grow your organisation – even if it is only slowly and in a small way to begin with. Also try and do as much ‘face to face’ and get out physically as much as possible, as people are more likely to engage with a physical project/activity that they can see and be a part of, rather than a more perforative one which is largely online based.

In terms of social media and publicity, instagram and their website are their main channels – with the instagram being a kind of signpost for their website, which is where all of their resources, information, opportunities, etc are posted. They were featured on Instagram’s own account, and she did say that she may be able to put me in contact there in the future, which would grow the size and following of the project.

Finally she gave me a few other helpful links and contacts, who may be very interesting to talk to and work with for my project, such as:

• Rewriting Extinction
• Yes Tribe
• Esri

Overall, it was a really successful and useful conversation to have, and has got me very fired up about starting my project properly!