Tir Canol is delighted to announce that we have been successful in securing a funding bid from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation to work on a series of co-designed, community-focussed projects over the next 4 years. These projects encompass four main elements:
1) Co-designing a natural flood management action plan for the Leri catchment, in partnership with the Talybont Community Flood Group and others. This local flood group has already been working on a Flood Resilience Project for the last two years in the Leri catchment, including the planting of over 20,000 trees with local landowners. Tir Canol will be working closely with the group to upscale this work, carrying out a year’s Co-design project to develop a long term plan and begin delivering key elements of this in the following years.
2) Building on the initial success of the Field Scale Trials pilot work to upscale this project, working alongside local farmers and growers to support them in trialling new crops or products in an agri-ecological way.
3) Embedding the arts as a key engagement and collaborative tool across the Tir Canol project area. Arts play a key role in our ambition to connect people more deeply to their local landscape, to the natural world and to our cultural heritage. Through a series of activities, this strand of the project will foster the development of a number of exciting artistic initiatives involving local artists, traditional crafts, exchange programmes and shows at the Eisteddfodau (Welsh language cultural festivals)
4) Landowner and farmer habitat restoration trials. A key aspect that landowners raised during Tir Canol’s Co-design phase was for more support in understanding ways to manage their land in a more nature-friendly way. This element of the project will provide funding to trial a range of different methods that foster greater biodiversity alongside farming systems locally, with a view to understanding how such methods can be upscaled and funded longer term.
Together, these four developing strands of Tir Canol’s work will form the ‘Cynnal’ project, who’s Welsh translation means ‘to hold, to maintain, to sustain’. We’re very excited to continue working with RSPB Cymru, Coed Cadw (Woodland Trust in Wales) and with our growing partnership to start delivering these projects, supported by the generous funding from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. We hope that this funding will provide a firm step forward for Tir Canol as we move from our core development stage towards delivering on all the ideas that have been fed into the project Blueprint over the core Co-design period.
A bit about our new funders
The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation aims to improve our natural world, secure a fairer future and strengthen the bonds in communities in the UK. In line with Tir Canol’s blueprint, Esmée unlock change by contributing everything we can alongside people and organisations with brilliant ideas who share our goals.
