A Little Oasis for the Community: Beacon of Hope - Tackling Flooding in Flintshire

Enbarr Foundation CIC was set up in 2017 as an offshoot of a commercial recruitment organisation to support people to find employment through niche markets and skills and extra training.

In 2020 they were successful in getting a National Lottery grant to help work with the local community and build skills around a community garden.

We spoke to Vicki Roskams of Enbarr Foundation CIC to talk about their work and their Climate Action Boost grant to support their local environment.

Engagement

“The first thing we did was we held engagement events with people within our community to understand their priorities and what would make our community better for them. We made sure we reached out to our whole surrounding community as there are lots of little rural communities all connected together encompassing people from different backgrounds. We tried to bring everyone together with the sole purpose of focusing on, as we kept calling it, the Beacon of Hope. The Beacon of Hope is the clocktower building which lies in the centre of our grounds, and that was used as the conduit for change, and to help people think differently, come out into nature, improve their wellbeing, come together, and share a goal for the future.”

Community gardens

“We found that people wanted to be able to use our sites garden again. They were untouched for 20 years and overgrown and unkept, and the flora and fauna was neglected and out of control and was harming the area more than enhancing it.

So, we decided as a community to tackle that and cut back the overgrowth bring us to a point where we could use the space as a place for people to go visit, and start seeing the heritage garden and features appear, enjoy themselves, and feel connected with nature. We were successful in getting National Lottery funding to bring people together and make that happen, and give the ecosystem a kickstart it deserved, whilst supporting the sites biodiversity and creating places for both fauna and flora to thrive”

Climate Action Boost

Enbarr Foundation CIC were later offered a chance to take part in The National Lottery Community Fund’s Climate Action Boost scheme – a programme to support existing National Lottery groups to make their projects more environmentally friendly. They identified that flooding was a key issue in their area and worked with Renew Wales to identify a solution.

“There's a flood plain field right next to us that has been given planning permission to be built upon which is actually causing an uplift of water and causing a lot of wildlife to move onto the local estates. I spoke to Renew Wales and we discussed how we could collect water to put in flood mitigation systems for the area to protect people’s homes as well as the local wildlife. We’ve also been told by Natural Resources Wales that the river could potentially flood and the river levels had risen 28% of the year.

I think a lot of people were against what we initially did as we started to cut back some of the self-seeded trees and Silver Birch. People tend to think, “shouldn’t you be protecting trees to tackle climate change?” but we were focussing on an overpopulated area that was at risk. In one area we took off 100 trees and that uncovered absolutely amazing old plants that we didn’t know about before. There was an olive tree, apple trees, a Chinese plum tree that had been gifted back in 1930’s, a small orchard that hadn’t been able to grow because of overpopulated land – we even found a fountain and a swimming pool once we cut plants back.

We then gave what we cut down to the community to use as fuel in woodburners, and to carve statues so the children could interact with the garden, repurposing what we had for the benefit of the community and to help tackle some local fuel poverty.

When I spoke to Renew Wales, we also talked about the idea of having a water tank to pull water off shotwick brook running to the river Dee as due to the uplift over the recent years from the building on flood plains it was starting to lift the foundations and break the culvert under the garage building alongside the clocktower.

Our project runs alongside the river and alongside it is a barrier that when the tide comes up it shuts the flow of the Dee. This then surcharges back up the culvert and under the nearby buildings. The water tank was an idea to help mitigate that – by storing the excess water in a tank we can then release it back into the Dee once the flood barrier was open again. The tower takes up to 10,000 cubic feet at a time and we divert around 60,000 a week. That’s enough to fill an Olympic size swimming pool in a month. “

Impacts

“Now that we’re clearing our garden and better protecting our land from flooding, we can get more people involved in learning about their local environment. When we run activities like dry-stone walling, for example, we can show how the insects living in among the nooks and crannies of the walls benefit local bird populations, and we can teach kids and their families about the world around them. And this is practical education that stays with people, and not something that you read about sitting behind a computer.

It’s the kind of education where you can see things happening with your own eyes, and you can see over time how the bird and bee populations are growing, how new birds are flocking here, and how they use different parts of the landscape. These are all things that are now, for many people, newly down the road for them to enjoy when it wasn’t there before. It’s like a little oasis for them.”

Future

“All we are is a facilitator for the community, and using our skills, knowledge and networks to make this happen. They took this project on and it’s their ideas that make create the vision for the future. We have our networks, consultants, and so on but at the end of the day it's getting the communities ideas and ensuring that not only are we encompassing them into the project going forwards but we're also creating empowerment that they then become the Champions of what we're doing and making a sustainable change for the future. They are Guardians of our future - they take a really active role in change, reaching out to further communities, and creating that connectivity.

It’s critical that the connectivity that we achieve isn’t just about digital. It’s about intergenerational connectivity and connecting people from one rural economy to the next. That’s what creates conversations and that’s how people feel like a part of their community. I feel that young people’s voices need to be better heard in communities and their ideas and approach to tackling climate change haven’t been taken on board yet by communities, and I think bringing people together is a way to help those voices be heard.

Without the National Lottery funding we would never have been able to be in the position we are now, that's fantastic.”

Learn more about National Lottery funding available to support communities to take climate action.