Discover the top ten recommendations from the Future Parks Accelerator for how to transform the green spaces in your places.

Green Social Prescribing (GSP) offers the opportunity to link the health benefits of parks to those who would most gain by spending time in a park.

It’s one of the trickiest areas the Future Parks Accelerator is grappling with. Mollie Dodd, FPA’s Commercial and Business Development Consultant, is helping our places think about opportunities to generate income.

Plymouth City Council recently launched a smartphone app called Love Exploring for their largest green space, Central Park. This sort of visitor intervention to increase human engagement and connection to the natural environment is one of the fastest growing, most widely accessible, and cost-effective ways of improving people’s wellbeing.

Our aim is to ensure parks are inclusive, attractive and accessible for all, reaching those with the greatest needs. We are working to maximise the role our parks can play in addressing health inequalities: in particular looking the prevention of ill health, early intervention and promotion of wellbeing.

Unlike traditional forests, community forests are not geographically restricted to one place. Instead, they are spread out across a mix of community woodland, private woodland, on street, urban woodland, wooded habitat corridors, orchards, and hedgerows.

One of the pillars of the Future Parks Accelerator programme is the support we provide to the places in the Cohort – alongside grant funding, a peer network, shared endeavour, testing and learning together. 

We've come a LONG way in the two years since the official launch of the programme.

Could we make volunteering more like a 'social group with a purpose'? More like booking a gym session, or going on a date - more fun & more flexible. Ditto professionalising and personalising the management of how it works - book a zoom call, ask (park mangers to make something happen rather than stop it).

The over 65s do lots of the volunteering. 39% of people aged 65-74 volunteer monthly compared to 25% of the wider public - this has been largely static for 15 years. Those people are getting older in years and so far the next generation aren't going to volunteer in the same way.