Coed Lleol (Small Woods Wales) reflects on successes of 2020

29 Ion 2021

In March 2020, the start of the first lockdown challenged us to rethink how we could deliver our woodland wellbeing programmes. Coed Lleol (Small Woods Wales) staff worked together to understand the needs of our participants during this difficult time and work out a strategy to help and support as many people as we could. This led to our #Naturefix programme, which included daily Nature and Wellbeing Sessions on Zoom, open to anyone in Wales. Our Foraging and Nutrition, Nature Watch, and Mindfulness Zoom sessions have continued into 2021.

We also started weekly local Zoom sessions in all of our project areas across Wales, enabling our participants to continue engagement with us and each other. For participants who were not online, a telephone befriending service was set up with a focus on conversations about nature and wellbeing. In order to support people who couldn't make it to our Zoom sessions, we also made 21 wellbeing and nature YouTube videos.

As restrictions lifted towards the end of 2020, we were able to resume some of our in-person woodland wellbeing groups, walking groups and woodland drop-in sessions. These proved to be more popular than ever. We're looking forward to getting back to the woods safely after this current lockdown.

Here's a summary of what we did during the pandemic in 2020. You can read the full report, here.