Birds, bats, bees and everyone who cares about the natural world have a new champion. Charlbury Town Council has appointed a self-employed contractor to support local nature projects. The £60,000 budget for the first year is funded by Sustainable Charlbury. It is the biggest financial commitment we have ever made.
Will Dennis, a former head of sustainability at Daylesford -the organic food and artisanal products centre, based near Kingham- has taken on the role. His company was awarded the contract after a competitive bidding process.
Pioneering plan for three parishes
The project covers the neighbouring parishes of Charlbury, Finstock and Fawler. The brief is to:
- Strengthen the local ‘nature recovery network’ of volunteers, landowners and others involved in tackling the environmental crisis;
- Increase community engagement with nature restoration;
- Support practical biodiversity and habitat projects;
- Expand citizen science and volunteer species monitoring;
- Work with local schools and youth groups to increase awareness of sustainability issues and the environment.
One key aim is to connect the activities taking place in this immediate locality more closely with the bigger picture of what is happening across Oxfordshire and beyond to address deep-seated problems such as habitat loss, biodiversity decline and river pollution.
The thinking is that individual nature projects in places like Charlbury or Finstock will have more impact if they fit within larger scale ‘landscape’ level solutions.
Passion for the environment
Will Dennis, the man with a contract to take on these challenges, describes himself as a life-long environmentalist since school days. He says he has a ‘passion for bringing people together to work under one big umbrella’, which is just as well as the role involves a great deal of coordination and persuasion.
Charlbury already has an unusually strong tradition of people volunteering for nature projects. Will stresses that he has no intention of getting in the way or trying to tell people what to do. Instead, he sees his role as offering support, resources and encouragement to get things moving, and in a strategic direction.
He had a career in food retailing before becoming head of sustainability at Daylesford. He left in 2024 to become a consultant advising companies on tackling climate change. Earlier this year, he established a new enterprise focused on nature recovery and food systems.
Close links with farmers
Will has close links with the North-East Cotswold Farmer Cluster, a grouping of farmers and landowners committed to regenerative farming methods and locally produced food. He plans to work closely with them to connect local parish work to their Evenlode Landscape Recovery project.
More than fifty farms have so far agreed to take part in this £100m, government-backed scheme. It will support improvements in areas such as flood control, habitat creation and carbon storage in the Evenlode catchment area over the next 20 years.
Among his many ideas for the three parishes project, Will wants to set up an online system that matches-up volunteers with farms that want help with citizen science projects such as species monitoring.
Engaging schools and the community
Other early plans include making greater use of QR codes on local nature sites to keep people informed via their mobile phones. He is also keen to work with schools on a programme that will enable every primary school child in the locality to visit a significant local nature recovery site at least once a year.
Community engagement is seen as a priority. Will plans to raise the profile of nature recovery by having a stand at big community events, such as the Riverside Festival and Charlbury Street Fair. Other ways of reaching out and keeping people informed may include putting up a noticeboard at Charlbury Community Centre or another prominent public place that showcases local nature projects.
Three-year project
Initially, funding from Sustainable Charlbury is available for one year, starting in June, during which Will is committed to working with local people to collaboratively develop nature recovery plans for Charlbury, Finstock and Fawler that play out over three years and establish a framework for the long term. It is hoped that long term funding will be found to help the project become self-sustainaing.
Will is accountable to Charlbury Town Council under a contract that sets out targets and milestones. On a more day-to-day, informal basis, he will work in consultation with the Land and Nature Working Group, a body set up by the Town Council to advise on environmental issues.
He sees the project as an exciting opportunity to create an exemplar for similar parish level schemes across the country.
