The CP3 team has continued to focus on developing the Health and Wellbeing strand of our work by sending out an ‘Expression of Interest’ form to see if a collaborative consortium bid to the Healthier Futures Fund might be supported. Fifty-five expressions of interest were received from organisations both large and small. The total amount of funding requested to deliver place-based preventative health projects that use nature to address health inequalities is more than £2.3m. This figure is far more than what might be available from the Integrated Care System. It demonstrates how much need and support there is for nature-based interventions that address preventative health and care for the environment. The team at CP3 are exploring what we can do to partner organisations to produce a coordinated bid to secure some of this investment so we can deliver on our mission of healthier parks, healthier planet, healthier people.

The team are also collaborating with Living Sport to market opportunities to get outdoors and enjoy our parks and open spaces over the summer holidays with the ‘#letsgetoutdoors’ campaign. This is a great opportunity to showcase our wonderful parks and get the whole family out to enjoy a variety of events and benefit from being together in the great outdoors. We will be promoting a park photo competition and winners will not only have their photos featured on the Cambsopenspace website but also they will receive a supermarket food voucher so that they can take their whole family to have a picnic party onus! (a flyer has been attached below)

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Open Space Forum recently hosted Prof. Jeff Ollerton -Ecological Scientist and Author, who spoke from Norway about Creating habitats for pollinators in parks: “it’s about more than just flowers!”

Pollinators are critically important to both wild nature and human society. During his career that spanned more than 30 years, Professor Jeff Ollerton established himself as one of the world’s leading experts on pollinators and pollination. He is the author of more than 150 articles and book chapters, is highly cited, and his ground-breaking research has been used by national and international agencies to support efforts to conserve pollinators and their pollination services. His key message was that a diverse landscape is the key to pollinator conservation. A bumble bee can fly 2.5km in 15 minutes and ecological features should aim to connect every km. In terms of what to plant, a deciduous native hedgerow is an excellent woody plant as its flowers are pollen rich and it is a stable a reliable feature of the landscape providing food, habitat and microclimate opportunities for many species. For more information, visit https://jeffollerton.co.uk/