Orchard Forest School provides an update following their Innovation Fund grant
Today, we have an update from Orchard Forest School CIC in Brixham, who were awarded a grant from our Innovation Fund last year to support their over-50s wellbeing group. Fundraiser Veronica Richardson has provided the following:
A reminder of our background
Orchard Forest School CIC (OFS) is based in a 4.5-acre ancient apple orchard within the grounds of Lupton House, Brixham. We provide a range of therapeutic groups/sessions for local children, families, organisations, and individuals using the power of nature and outdoors activities. The OFS nature space and activity groups help tackle societal issues such as social dislocation, isolation, and loneliness, and benefits the Torbay community by providing a safe, calm, peaceful and inclusive place to go to meet new friends, build new relationships, learn new food and life skills and have fun safely in the outdoors.
It provides an inspirational hands-on, multi-sensory learning experience which promotes self-esteem, confidence, independence, and resilience — all impacting positively on mental and physical health and wellbeing. Our regular sessions are for pre-school children (Mini Explorers), home-educating families, childminders and their children, young carers, adult carers, children and families in grief, Down’s syndrome support group, over 50s, and anyone who need support from wellbeing practitioners and are referred to us by their social prescribers. We also provide tailored courses for local schools.
Our aims are to:
Support our local community to improve their quality of life and to thrive by providing a safe. enclosed therapeutic outdoor space within which individuals and groups can learn about the natural environment and experience a wide range of new skills, giving them the opportunity for confidence building, and learning essential life and employability skills including from intergenerational skills sharing. Our group activities promote social interaction and local community engagement, building social connections and physical activities — all of which have positive impacts on health and wellbeing.
Maintain and care for our ancient apple orchard, which is an important and environmentally sustainable community safe space. Sessions encourage everyone to get back in touch with nature, explore and enjoy their natural surroundings, and help maintain and support the orchard’s ecosystem.
Provide opportunities for volunteering and apprenticeships for those wishing to contribute to their local community environment or work in Forest School linked occupations.
The over-50s group
Over the past four years, we have run various groups for the older generation, providing them with opportunities for social interaction, building social connections, and undertaking physical activities. This was particularly important during the pandemic when they felt lonely and isolated, with limited access to clubs, groups, friends and family.
Being able to provide a safe outdoors space helped us to keep everyone safe through the pandemic and offered a place to have a chat and build friendships and relationships to help prevent the feeling of isolation. Our outdoor environment ensures our over 50s get plenty of Vitamin D and provides the opportunity for them to undertake some physical activity via gardening, walking around, bending, and stretching within each individual’s limits. Such regular physical activity is beneficial for both mobility and heart/lung functions. We offer a hot soup/lunch around the fire and refreshments.
Some of our elderly participants don’t see anyone else during the week and it’s sometimes their only meal spent with others. We have also seen an increasing number of bereaved being referred to this group by their social prescribers.
Innovation
Our over-50s group is held weekly, and once a month this session becomes intergenerational by joining with another one of our groups — the registered childminders and their early years children. This was set up originally in response to the over-50s expressing how much they were missing the face-to-face contact with their younger family members during the pandemic due to the lack of contact and ability to travel up and down the country to visit.
The aim has been to bring the generations together, to share old and new skills in an outdoor environment, promoting play and storytelling, and enjoying work and recreation together. The benefits for the senior participants have been to help prevent the feeling of isolation, enable them to share their skills and stories from their own childhood, feel regenerated and energised with early years children around them, and overall to feel a renewed sense of worth and part of something special.
For the youngsters, the benefits are that they can share their news and stories, share new skills with the older generation, learn a range of new skills and vocabulary from them, and overall have the opportunity to make new friends of a different generation and learn that older people can be fun to be around. In using a storytelling and play approach, this intergenerational group has brought the generations together informally and promoted language and communication skills for both ends of the age scale, as well as helping to improve physical and mental health and wellbeing for all.
Funding
We have not historically charged the over-50s for participating in the group sessions, as their gardening activities help us to maintain the orchard — so to date, we have been fully reliant on external funding to keep this group going. The grant provided by the Alliance’s Innovation Fund effectively covered three months’ wages for the over-50s group and was fully used up by the end of September 2023. At that stage, we were seriously considering whether we would have to shut this group down, but fortunately an anonymous donor stepped in at the last minute to enable us to carry on for another few months.
I therefore cannot stress enough how important funds such as the Innovation Fund are for small groups such as ourselves, who provide a lifeline to disadvantaged groups. It is also worth highlighting that for our over-50s group, we are effectively a stopgap between the GPs and further advanced support from mental health practitioners. The seniors who attend our group often feel isolated and lonely, but they don’t necessarily need intense health support, although they do need something to prevent their mental health deteriorating.