Bigger, Better, More Joined Up

The last 3 years have presented unique challenges both personally and professionally. There is no doubt that all of us experienced a shift in our realities.  

When Covid forced international ‘lockdowns’ in 2020, it was an incredible test on human resilience, as well as business. Especially those of you with small businesses and self-employed will have been under incredible pressure to maintain some sort of stability to get-through until business could resume as ‘normal’.  

But we also saw incredible innovation, opportunity and community spirit. People and businesses adapted to provide support and services that could offer tangible solutions that were needed in the moment. The priorities became safe contact with friends and family, access to food, and nature for wellbeing.  

Things at Kent Wildlife Trust were no different, we were subject to loss of earnings circa. £600k, we had to carefully balance furlough, we were forced to close visitor centres and were no longer able to utilise the incredible support of our 600+ volunteers. 

As a business, this level of vulnerability was terrifying.  

Tackling the 'new normal'

In 2018, our first Wilder Kent strategy was designed to highlight the context we were operating in at that time. This focused on the level of threat to nature and the charity business model due to Brexit, continued political uncertainty, loss of traditional funding streams, human disconnection with nature and the immediate, and very real increasing levels of biodiversity loss and changing climate.  

We had already begun to diversify our business, implementing changes to our structure and culture to position us to not just survive these threats, but accelerate and thrive; delivering the level of impact that was now required to tackle these global issues. Change needed to become a constant to weather the waves of challenge that we continued to face.  

I feel this strategy went a long way in enabling us to act with agility and innovation through lock down, quickly adapting our digital systems, maintaining access to as many reserves as we could for people when they most needed it, and online for those who couldn’t get out, ensuring the welfare of our livestock, and the wellbeing and resilience of our staff who worked so so hard.  

There were definitely hard lessons learned. One of the hardest is that the ‘normal’ we were anticipating slipping back into, never came.  

The cadence of life continues to ‘feel off’. Things continue to seem harder and faster. And as a conservation body, we know that we are in the fight of our lives.  

Nature is reaching a point of no return, yet globally, human impact continues to contribute to loss of nature and rapid global warming. In the UK, Government has set targets to halt species decline, deliver net zero ambitions and boost nature recovery. And to stimulate at least £500m of private investment into nature recovery in England each year from 2027, rising to more than £1billion each year from 2030.  

Admirable targets that are unfortunately not translating into successful action. When you dig into the detail of how this is meant to be delivered, it is shortsighted and lacking in sustainable solutions (a blog for another day).  

We must act now

And so, the refreshed Wilder Kent Strategy sets out how we must act now at a significantly increased scale of action given the interlinked climate and biodiversity crises with Goal 3 focusing on growing our income sources and strengthening our systems, whilst operating sustainability, to achieve this.  

This very much starts with building upon the culture of change we have now formed. Traditional conservation business practice is not working – we, like nature, need to be BIGGER, BETTER and MORE JOINED UP. Our staff are therefore enabled to work together, collaboratively, to be brave and bold in our action and innovate to deliver class leading work.

By encouraging a growth mind-set in our people, we are embracing the void of any ‘normal’ and taking advantage of this new disruptive rhythm and flow of life to try different approaches. We must act now, together we can create a #WilderKent. 

Cross-cutting solutions

These different approaches by our staff provide the foundation for an expanded delivery model, not only providing cross-cutting solutions that directly tackle our major threats, but also presenting diversified income streams to pay for them.  

For example,

• Natue-based Solutions products like our high integrity Biodiversity Net Gain scheme via Adonis Blue, and Conservation Carbon Credits generated via the Wilder Carbon Standard for Climate and Nature, both initiatives which began their development during the lockdown period.
• Our expanded education and experience offer across Kent including; new holiday clubs, expanded Wilder Wellbeing programmes supporting physical and mental health, Wilder Kent Awards recognising the action of organisations across Kent, individual and team building safari’s and experience days with our incredible ecosystem engineers; bison and beavers.
• Off the back of us doubling our efforts to improve our internal systems to become more efficient and effective; our emerging digital solutions offer, using innovative tools and modelling to better highlight opportunities for conservation across the UK including a nature recovery mapping, livestock tracking and our ‘My Wilder Kent’ app coming very soon.  

Another key theme in our new strategy is working in partnership, we can’t do this alone and many of these initiatives are designed to better enable us to build the business case for nature, enable collaborations with partners and businesses, and provide opportunities and access for individuals to defend and restore nature.  

We are proud to be able to offer so many ways (beyond those mentioned above) for all to engage with nature and support the ongoing protection and restoration of our precious natural spaces.  

Please get in touch with us to find out more about how you can join us in delivering a Wilder Kent 2030! 

References

New legally binding environmental targets set out - Gov.uk

Environment Improvement Plan 2023 - Gov.uk