On Tuesday 11th May Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Future parks hosted a Health and Wellbeing Workshop, delivered in collaboration with project partners Futurebright Solutions. The aspirations of the workshop were to bring representatives from a wide range of sectors together to explore opportunities to improve health and wellbeing in parks and green open spaces.

Over 60 people attended from a wide range of backgrounds including representatives from the health sector, voluntary sector, environment sector and parks sector. After a brief introduction from the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Future Parks team and a guest presentation from Naturally Birmingham, attendees were invited to share their thoughts on the opportunities for strategic collaboration between parks and health professionals.

The big question of the day was how can we work collectively to use our parks and open spaces to support improved health, wellbeing, and quality of life?

There was strong consensus among the group that the key to collectively delivering health and wellbeing activities in parks and open spaces was as a joined-up network of practitioners from the health, voluntary, and environment / parks sector. In the first instance, attendees proposed the development of a network or forum to bring all interested parties together to share opportunities, knowledge, good practice, and learning. Building a network would also enable the collaborative group to develop a strategic health and wellbeing offer, using parks and green spaces as a ‘hub for delivery,’ and create a space to explore joint-funding opportunities.

“workshops like this one really help to bring people together and improve communication between health and parks”

– Workshop participant

Sharing information and opportunities would also help raise awareness of what activities in parks are currently available and enable partners to sign-post people to opportunities suitable for them. Attendees wanted to take this idea further and proposed a public facing ‘portal’ that residents and practitioners can use to find their local park or green space, the facilities, groups, and activities the are available, and who their main point of contact would be.

The group highlighted that, for a collective approach to delivering health and wellbeing benefits in parks to be successful, the network must secure buy-in from those working on the ground in the health sector, such as GPs and health surgeries, the community and voluntary sector, and grass roots organisations, all of whom are a key link to local communities. Community, voluntary, and grass roots organisations are key contacts who can identify where there is need to develop initiatives, feedback information to local communities, and raise awareness. Attendees also highlighted the need to communicate the importance of parks and open spaces for people’s health and wellbeing to key decision makers, local elected members and representatives from the combined authority.

Following on from our health and wellbeing workshop, the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Future Parks team are exploring the opportunities to support, collaborate, or accelerate existing work across the county, building best practice examples and working to better understand how these can be brought to a county wide scale. The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Future Parks team have also commissioned a public facing map of the county’s parks and public open spaces and are exploring the potential to broaden the scope of this map, over the longer term, to include a catalogue of volunteer, community groups and other activities active in people’s local parks and open spaces.