Meet our Community Organising Officer, Marianne

Meet our Community Organising Officer, Marianne

I'm the new Community Organising Officer for Swansea with The Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales and will be working on the Nextdoor Nature project.
Marianne, our new Nextdoor Nature Officer

Nextdoor Nature project aims to provide communities in highly urbanised areas of Swansea with the advice and support they need to help nature on their doorstep.

I'm excited to be working on this project as it brings together two of my passions, wildlife and people. I am a Biology graduate from Bath Spa University and for the past two years have been working in higher education representing young people on issues such as wildlife action, housing and cost of living. I'm a fluent Welsh speaker and was born in Cardiff which means I'm so happy to be working in Wales again. I’m a friendly person so if you see me around please come and say hi! Communities already do so much work for nature and there are many who I'd like to help to achieve their goals and ambitions for local wildlife.

Thanks to funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, Nextdoor Nature will build on #TeamWilder to work towards a more community organising based approach. Project actions could include: enhancing existing local greenspaces, establishing new green corridors in areas of nature deprivation, rewilding school grounds, or naturalising highly urbanised or unused areas - but we want this change to be driven by the individual needs of Swansea's communities! By giving local people the tools to decide what happens, we hope to drive sustainable change that continues after the Nextdoor Nature Project ends. We hope that by shifting to a community organising approach we create a network of people working towards conserving biodiversity and helping to mitigate the climate emergency!

I am looking forward to working closely with communities in Swansea to find out what we can do to take action for nature. If you are interested in helping nature on your doorstep, then get in touch via Facebook or email m.evans@welshwildlife.org