Everyone wants more trees! We will be planting trees with lots of community groups and landowners in the Stroud area. We have just received delivery of a further 2,000 trees – bringing our total to 3,200 - and are in the process of organising tree planting workshops around the district over the next 2 months. Our Wild About Trees planting project has been supported by local donors, Environment Agency and last week we received funding from The National Lottery, enabling us to plant trees both this season and next. Do contact us if you are interested in getting involved in planting or if you have land suitable for planting trees. If you would like to donate to our Wild About Trees tree planting project you can make a donation via our website or in our eco shop, or you can purchase a £10 tree gift voucher in the shop.

Created: 22 January 2020

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Press release from Stroud District Council dated 27 November 2019

Wild flowers, trees and seating will transform a former Stroud District Council garage site as part of a project to improve three canalside areas in Stonehouse.

As part of the re-wilding project, Great Crested newts are set to get a new pond at another site, and a third site will also provide new habitat for bees.

Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust has started working on the Wild Towns project, which has received funding from the European Regional Development Fund and is being match funded by Stroud District Council and Stonehouse Town Council.

Created: 02 December 2019

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Our raffle is our Christmas fundraiser, that time of year when we have some fun and win some prizes. We have a fantastic array of prizes for you this year, they are either kindly donated by Friends and supporters, or have an environmental theme and/or support our ethos of trying to be the best we can be from an environmental point of view.

Below you can see some of the prizes you can win, and by taking part you will be supporting our charity at the same time!

Created: 28 November 2019

A new study into the impact of outdoor activity on children's wellbeing suggests that being outside can help youngsters feel more confident and capable of trying new things. Many of the children who took part in the study also believe that spending time in nature can give their school work a boost, according to the report.

The Wildlife Trusts, which commissioned the study, said the findings show that children experience "profound and diverse benefits" through having regular contact with nature, and that every child should have the chance to "experience the joy of wildlife in daily life." Contact with the wild improves children's wellbeing, motivation and confidence.

Photo : Deb Roberts

Created: 20 November 2019

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Environmental charity Stroud Valleys Project is launching a new tree planting project this winter called ‘Wild About Trees’. The Stroud based charity wants to raise £10,000 from local people to plant 1,000 trees around the district.

Chief executive Clare Mahdiyone explained: “With climate change high on the agenda, people come to us wondering what they can practically do to contribute to the fight against carbon emissions. We have a track record for planting trees locally so we are launching an appeal so we could plant lots more.”

Created: 28 October 2019

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This is a month-long campaign designed to encourage more people to try organic and aims to be a way to promote and educate people about organic food and farming practices.

Following a year of unprecedented environmental protest and ground-breaking research, there’s never been a better moment to shout about the role organic farming has to play in the climate change debate by benefiting nature, wildlife, our planet, our health and building healthy soils. If we buy more organic food to support organic farming this will mean that we can slow down climate change together.

Admittedly organic is usually more expensive and if that is a barrier the other option is to grow your own fruit and vegetables without using chemicals. At Stroud Valleys Project we have allotment space and various growing areas where we grow, cook and share the produce with our volunteers. At the moment we seem to have more cucumbers than we can eat! As a result we have been pickling them for the winter. If you would like to learn more about growing your own do get in touch and find out about joining one of our volunteer teams.

Our volunteers get a chance to get involved lots of different types of work and a current example is Waterscapes. This project aims to help the struggling salmon together with a wide range of other fish species by improving passage along the River Frome.  We have enabled the rewetting of an old channel (paleochannel) at Bond’s Mill in Stonehouse, Gloucestershire to achieve this end. Our volunteers joined in with the work on site last week to help create a gravel bed in the river.

This project, involving partners from across the Severn Vale including WWT, Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group South-West, Severn Rivers Trust and Stroud Valleys Project has been made possible by major funding from the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development. Over the next two years, work will be carried out at four key sites along the River Frome, as well as at WWT Slimbridge and Walmore Common SSSI.

Created: 26 September 2019

We love this poem. It sums up everything we want to achieve by having a green burial ground. Imagine a field that is bare now, full of trees, carefully planted and lovingly tended.

Printed here by kind permission of Pam Ayres.

Woodland Burial

Don’t lay me in some gloomy churchyard shaded by a wall
Where the dust of ancient bones has spread a dryness over all,
Lay me in some leafy loam where, sheltered from the cold
Little seeds investigate and tender leaves unfold.
There kindly and affectionately, plant a native tree
To grow resplendent before God and hold some part of me.
The roots will not disturb me as they wend their peaceful way
To build the fine and bountiful, from closure and decay.
To seek their small requirements so that when their work is done
I’ll be tall and standing strongly in the beauty of the sun.

Created: 02 September 2019

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This is an extract from the August 2019 Stratford Park Newsletter

This month Stroud Valleys Project volunteers have been transplanting aquatic plants in the lake. It was exactly this time last year that we started restoration works to the lake and graded the banks. Last autumn one elevation of the banks was sown with a ‘pond side mix’ containing marginal plants, but this was not successful.

Next month Tamsin and her group will be re-sowing a more robust seed mixture to the banks. Richard Spyvee (Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust Living Landscapes Manager) has been supplying the plants from a local source; these include several species of reeds, rushes and native oxygenating plants.

SVP team leader Tamsin planting aquatics in the lake.

Photo: Mike McCrea

Created: 02 September 2019

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Environmental charity Stroud Valleys Project has won a Gold Award from Green Impact. Green Impact is an international environmental behaviour change programme that works with hundreds of organisations throughout the world and helps them to become more environmentally sustainable.

It has been working with organisations taking part in the GEM Project (Going the Extra Mile, a Gloucestershire-based project funded by the National Lottery Community Fund and the European Social Fund that aims to engage with and support individuals to move closer towards education, training, volunteering or work) which includes Stroud Valleys Project. Green Impact provides a yearlong support programme for organisations to improve their sustainability, and at the end of the year it awards either a gold, silver or bronze award to the organisation for their endeavours. All the GEM organisations increased their environmentally friendliness, but Stroud Valleys Project was one of only two organisations to achieve gold.

Clare Mahdiyone, CEO of Stroud Valleys Project said, ‘we are absolutely thrilled to receive this nationally accredited Gold award. As an environmental charity, we would hope to do well, but it was a rigorous programme and it required us to improve. It was great to take part. It acknowledges the work our team do, day in and day out, to be more sustainable, and to cut carbon in the workplace’.

Created: 28 August 2019