2022 - Finding Balance

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March 2022 saw us moving out of an unexpectedly successful year and arriving in a place where we felt a bit more settled after the pandemic.  From a personal point of view it became a difficult year after the summer with family sickness and bereavement for the Executive Director in early 2023, but luckily the business was ticking along nicely with some new members of staff running sessions, and covering where needed.  We have parked our adult training for the moment, as we hadn’t enough time to focus on it.

 

Yoga classes were restructured to make timings more convenient, to open up Fridays for more ad hoc work and to enable Suzy space to support her family.  Kids parties were phased out, as it was decided they were a lot of work both from an admin perspective and from a delivery point of view.  They were not really in line with our Community focus as a CIC, and didn’t generate enough income to support our free community offerings, so it was decided to place our focus elsewhere.  One of our team runs her own Forest School parties, so we chose to refer all our booking requests to her, which worked well for everyone.  Over this year, we developed more new partnerships and successfully secured an ongoing relationship with the schools we were working with, bringing another school on board as a regular commitment.

 

Homestart Croydon

 

We have continued work with young families in our Croydon Homestart sessions which happen in Shirley Church Rec in Shirley, Croydon.  Homestart are a well known and established charity working with families, and the Croydon branch have been our partners for a number of years, offering funding and support to us, developing ideas for how we might work together.  We were lucky enough to be commissioned to run 18 family sessions over the course of the year with a view to continuing into the future for as long as funding allows. 

 

Suzy handed the facilitation of these sessions over to Andrea in Spring 2022, and the sessions continue to be extremely popular under her wonderful leadership.  Young families, who are able to access them for free, spend a couple of hours outdoors around a camp fire, taking part in a variety of sensory, Forest School inspired activities together.  The sessions are always fully booked with a waiting list. 

 

Schools

 

Our Forest School sessions for Bensham Manor School (secondary children with additional needs) continue to be extremely successful and well received, and they run throughout the academic year.  The school and the young people have really valued the continuity we have been able to offer them through all the uncertain times and our relationship continues to grow from strength to strength.  We work with all the year 8’s throughout the course of an academic year, and each class gets a whole day, once a week for 6 weeks at Frylands Wood Scout Centre.  Each group is very different with a variety of needs which the flexibility of the Forest School approach really suits, and the SEND training and experience of our staff team means we are able to offer an excellent experience to these young people.

 

Our work with Ridgeway Primary in Sanderstead and St Peter’s School in South Croydon, continues to be really successful and valued.  2 of our staff work with St Peter’s Primary, and we walk groups from the school, up to Croham Hurst for their Forest School experience, which is wonderful for them.   

 

We have since taken on another staff member to cover Suzy at Ridgeway, to enable her to take on another contract with Forestdale Primary School who approached us for support in Spring 2022.  We first began running a lunchtime session for them with mixed success as it was a very short window to achieve anything significant, but they soon asked us to commence a regular weekly afternoon session with them, starting in the summer term of 2022.  We have developed their Forest School area on site, making it a safe space to play and really fit for purpose.  This is unfolding really nicely and it’s a pleasure to work with another school which is geared up to ensure their students get the most out of their outside space. 

 

 

 

Kids Wild Adventure Club

 

We continued to run integrated sessions (a mix of mainstream and SEND children) in all school holidays throughout the year with numbers of up to 10 children per session to enable us to give the one to one attention needed.  We did notice a bit of a ‘drop off’ in demand in comparison to the Covid times, but realised this was to be expected as folk were finally able to return to doing other things than only outdoor activities.  The children were aged 5-11.  We are still very happy at Frylands Wood Scout Centre.  We continued to offer a tiered pricing system to enable low income families to access sessions and will keep this in place going forward.  We continue to attract a high number of children with additional needs and this way of working really suited the work we were able to do and the support we were able to give them.

 

Summer sessions were extended again, and saw us offering additional activities such as Tomahawk Throwing, Bee experiences with Mrs Burney’s Bees (another CIC based in Frylands Wood) but this year they were not so popular, so instead we offered other activities aimed at families to see if these would be more successful. 

 

 

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Family Camp – Summer 2022

 

This summer we were really pleased to be able to run the Family Camp at Frylands Wood Scout centre.  Much more humble than last year’s retreat where we had bell tent accommodation for parents, this year we offered the tents which we had inherited from Croydon Council when we incorporated, to families for a 2 night camp.   It is still important to us to be able to offer families the chance to have respite, but be at their best together.  Often parents and children are offered opportunities which take place away from each other and we felt folk were missing the chance to be together when they were put in a place where they were able to relax and ‘hand over’ things like cooking and chores, and have activities provided for them. 

 

We cooked and ate communally.  There were arts and crafts, games, star gazing, yoga and fitness, conversation and night walking.  It was really well received, and the sense of community and support was wonderful as always.  A really special couple of days – very hard work for the staff team who all volunteered their time to run this together, but so worth it.

 

 

Family sessions

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We ran a couple of ‘Really Wild’ family survival sessions in the summer which went very well!   For our community offering, we ran our traditional Spooktacular in October at Frylands Wood and by December had come up with an idea to run ‘Tribe’ days for families and individuals, so our Yule event was a wonderful community day where we cooked a feast together and ate under beautifully decorated gazebos in sub zero temperatures!  It was a testament to how popular these sessions are that folk came out in such conditions!   All our staff volunteer for these events, which continues to be a wonderful contribution to the community.

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Legacy Youth Zone

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We were approached by the new youth centre in Croydon to run an overnight camping residential which was good fun!  None of the young people or staff had camped out before, so it was hard work for the staff team, but everyone really embraced it and had a great time!  The weather was kind to us, and we hope that the young people made some memories they will keep forever.

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Elderflower Fields festival / Into the Trees festival

 

We took part in our first ever music festival - Elderflower Fields, run by So Sussex who we made connections with last year.  It took place in Sussex in May this year. We ran a drop in Creation Station for families to free flow and make crafts, sit by the fire, chat and relax in the woods.  We all camped over for the weekend and had a brilliant time!  Our payment was free tickets to the event, and we are keen to continue this relationship going forward as it was a great opportunity for us all to have this experience, and to connect with a community beyond Croydon.

 

We were asked to return again in September to the sister festival also run by So Sussex called ‘Into the Trees’ – a quieter acoustic affair, but also very enjoyable.  We hope to continue the relationship and to offer yoga at the festivals next year.

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Wild Woman sessions / Menopause and Peri-Menopause camp

 

We continued these sessions until about half way through the year as we were finding attendance was dropping, and we needed to place our energy elsewhere as Suzy was dealing with emerging family illness.  We have parked the ide for now, but hope to revisit it when we have more time as we think the sessions are really needed.

 

Off the back of these, we were asked to run an overnight camp in August for women in the stages of perimenopause and menopause.  We coordinated the camp and ran yoga and meditation sessions along with bushcraft skills and crafts.  It was a beautiful camp, and is definitely something we would like to put our energy into developing when we have more time.  

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Yoga

 

We now run 2 hour long weekly sessions on a Tuesday and Wednesday morning, having dropped the Friday in December of this year to free up time to concentrate on family needs.  However, we ran our first 3 hour half day weekend retreat at Studio at 39 in South Croydon in December.  This is a small, privately owned studio which hosts all manner of community events, and is very beautiful.  We look forward to working alongside them and offering a deeper, more intensive and altogether different kind of experience to the short sessions in church halls that we have been used to this far.

 

 

Going forward…

 

The team continues to grow and we are all extremely proud of what we have achieved, and what we have offered to the Croydon community this year.  Looking at all the different pieces of work we have facilitated and co-facilitated, we are so happy to know that our presence in Croydon remains strong and our contributions to the community are valued.

 

We have continued to make a significant impact on the lives of children, adults, families, schools and community organisations in Croydon this year.  We have received some wonderful feedback from partners, parents and children throughout and it continues to be a real privilege to work with all these families and community groups and to be able to support so many people to reconnect with nature, with ourselves and others.

 

We look forward to continuing this valuable work in the future, building on our community offerings, brokering more relationships with like minded members of the Croydon community and spreading the love of the outdoors ever further with each year we continue.

 

 

 

Suzy Strudwick

Executive Director

Go Wild with Us UK