Wildlife Trust and Social Prescribing

Thank you so much for attending our Social Prescribing Webinar. We hope you enjoyed it an really really hope the opportunities Cheshire and Lancashire Wildlife Trust have on offer can support your service users. We have a broad range of research to support our natural wellbeing opportunities. There is more of what we covered on the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts, wellbeing page. We also have a host of scientific research into the Wildlife Trust's volunteering and wellbeing opportunities.

From 2015-17 the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Essex carried out research on behalf of The Wildlife Trusts, to:

■ Study the mental wellbeing of volunteers on Wildlife Trust projects
■ Collect information from projects across The Wildlife Trusts to evaluate their impact on people’s health and wellbeing
■ Review the scientific literature, to investigate whether nature-rich environments had any specific impacts on people’s health and wellbeing

The findings are particularly important for people who live with a mental health condition. The research showed that nature volunteering had the most significant impact on those with low levels of mental wellbeing at the start of the project.

An evaluation of the health and wellbeing impacts of volunteering for 12 weeks with Wildlife Trusts found:

60% reported becoming more physically active
New volunteers trebled the number of days they were physically active
83% improved their mental wellbeing

Our opportunities offer a fantastic social return in investment, for every £1 invested in specialised opportunities offers a return of £6.88. You can read more about this in our research paper by Leeds Beckett University.

There is also an independent review of My Place project in Lancashire Wildlife Trust. We hope this research supports you to be able to offer our opportunities to service users. If there is anything we can support with please do get in touch with Katie from Cheshire Wildlife Trust, and Jenni Lea from Lancashire Wildlife Trust.