Broadclyst Environmental Group: Community Voices
Join Broadclyst Environmental Group on a journey towards a sustainable future, where projects in the community can motivate you to make a positive impact on the environment. With activities such as community litter picks, safe cycling and walking path maintenance, water quality monitoring and community fun days! Look out for their feature in the next edition of Reconnect Magazine.
Broadclyst Environment Group is a community driven organisation dedicated to maintaining and enhancing the local environment in the Broadclyst Parish. We joined CAG Devon in May 2024 after receiving advice about our safeguarding policy, attending their safeguarding training session and certainly enjoying ourselves at their SkillShare23! Our group works with Broadclyst Parish Council and East Devon District Council, to organise and participate in various environmental activities and campaigns. Our local volunteers are passionate about preserving the natural beauty and sustainability of our surroundings. We communicate and coordinate through our Facebook page and a WhatsApp group, and we welcome anyone interested in joining our efforts!
Our projects have included taking part in the “Big Spring Clean” campaign and organising community litter picks, which have resulted in the collection of over 50 bags of rubbish. We advocate for, and maintain, safe cycling and walking paths, including debris clearance and campaigning for new infrastructure.
We volunteer as citizen scientists with the Westcountry Rivers Trust to monitor water quality in local streams and rivers – rightly a hot topic at the moment. Our members also engage in creative environmental projects, such as the National Trust Killerton’s “Poetry Bomb” event, where we submitted environmentally themed Haiku poems. We encourage community involvement by collecting pledges from residents to commit to eco-friendly actions like trying vegetarianism, walking to work, or growing vegetables, with 20 pledges collected so far. Our goal is to foster a community spirit around environmental stewardship, encouraging collective action for a sustainable future.
We recently enjoyed taking part in the annual Broadclyst Village Fun Day. This event, helped by the lovely weather, provided a fantastic opportunity to engage our community on environmental matters. For our stall this year, we were fortunate to benefit from the loan of exhibits from the excellent Exeter Science Centre. Their brilliant pledge resources and mirror exhibit were big hits, sparking laughs and thoughtful pledges from attendees. We also featured a fun recycling game from Recycle Devon, which led to loads of conversations, and it was impressive how many kids knew what bins to use!
Our own contributions included information boards about swifts, packets of edible insects for the adventurous, and our pledge dust sheet, which quickly filled with amazing pledges from community members. One of our favourite pledges was, “To set up a junior environment group.” Now comes the exciting part—delivering on these pledges!
The day was filled with great conversations and the joy of seeing both familiar and new faces. It’s incredibly reassuring to know that many in our community are committed to caring for our local environment and the planet as a whole.
The event was a perfect example of partnership and community spirit in action. We are thrilled to have had so many great conversations and to have collected such a variety of pledges. It’s clear that our community is passionate about the environment, and we are excited to move forward with these initiatives together.
For more information and to get involved, join our Facebook group or contact us at broadclystenvgrp@gmail.com.
