We wish you all a Happy Christmas and New Year and hope during this madly busy time that you will find a quiet, wild and natural place to sit peacefully and draw breath. We certainly need this at the Foundation after a very busy year with great outcomes and several exciting future plans for 2012.
We will be sending out a more comprehensive newsletter in the New Year when hopefully people will have more time to digest news. As a taster we will include our achievements and future hopes for:
- Sirius – our environmental leadership programme in Scotland
- Wild Swans – our passion filled programme for young women in social and environmental leadership
- TurnAround – working with some of the most vulnerable young people in the country and linking wilderness, connectedness to nature and vastly improved self esteem
- Wilderness Trails – for young people in South Africa – getting to understand the true value of wilderness experience for their own development but also creating guardians of wilderness and wild places into the future.
- Down to Earth – linking nature and our neighbours through community gardening
- Sustainable Peace Network – continuing to share the learning of how wilderness experience can ‘humanise’ enemies and people in conflict with each other,helping to find common purpose and understanding.
Our vision is to preserve the world’s last remaining wild places by highlighting their positive impact on the health of the individual, society
and the planet.
In 2012 we will be :
- Expanding several of our established projects into new areas of the country;
- Rewilding our meadows and natural space around our offices in partnership with Strutt and Parker (Farms) with an educational motive around farming and bio-diversity;
- Taking on a base in Perthshire, Scotland from which we will run several of our programmes
- Setting up a Wilderness Academy to provide environmental education in Essex and its surrounds.
Your support is vital in helping us to achieve our goals. On behalf of our beneficiaries, the staff and our trustees, may I thank you for the help that you have given the Foundation throughout 2011, and the many precedeing years. This past twelve months has highlighted the vital importance of our work more than ever before and the urgent need to reconnect people with the natural world.
With your continued support, through Friends Subscriptions, Donations, attendance at our fundraising events and so generously giving of your time, next year we will be able to touch even more lives.
Thank you.
