Green Gown Awards 2021: Benefitting Society - Cardiff Metropolitan University - Highly Commended

Hero’s Haven student society project

Hero’s Haven is a student led project about hope. Throughout lockdown we have worked as volunteers with children in our local Pupil Referral Centre to meet their needs of wellbeing, life skills, learning and community engagement, through environmental and sustainability-based workshops. These children are vulnerable so still attended the unit all through 2020.

We offer a combination of COVID safe online resources that can be accessed by our YouTube channel. In person workshops covering activities such as gardening, environmental protection, nature-based arts and crafts using recycled materials. Community forest planting days, where we have successfully planted an 80 tree food forest in Llandaff campus. This will be looked after and harvested by the college and the school communities. The project will eventually spread to other youth centres in Cardiff and become self-sustaining through selling produce at our community market and running forest school activities adding environmental entrepreneurship to the impact of the project.

Top 3 learnings:

• Know what you’re doing and why. It’s about researching the need and achieving the impact.
• Keep it real. Focus on the thing you can achieve over impractical big ideas.
• Communicate. Make sure everyone knows what’s happening when, and delegate work.

Videos

• Video #1 (click to hide)