Social Value - Coventry Healthy Lifestyles service

The Social Value Contribution was awarded to Coventry Healthy Lifestyles Service (HLS), following Karen Wagstaff’s efforts working closely with The Canal River Trust to support regeneration of the Canal Basin in the city.

In Karen’s role as Service Manager at HLS – ICE Creates, she works with professionals and communities across Coventry to support clients to make healthy lifestyle choices, she developed strong connections between HLS Coventry, the Mental Health Team at Swanswell Point who work with clients with mental health issues. As well as encouraging their own clients who were looking to get more active and improve their physical activity, Karen worked together with Swanswell to motivate their clients to volunteer in reviving the space as a way of supporting them in being more active and connecting with others.

This project has meant the Canal Basin community garden has had well-needed love and attention, but and providing people with the opportunity to get outside and learn a new skill. Under the guidance of The Canal River Trust the volunteers have been able to take ownership of maintaining the garden and watch their hard work develops into a beautiful space that can be enjoyed by the community.

“This project came about when we met with The Canal River Trust and discussed how we could work in partnership to support our clients and the local community to get more active in the area.

We were going to offer gardening sessions with the help of the Canal Trust and our staff volunteering to support any clients they were currently working with to get out and connect,” Karen said.

The project is now funded by three partners including Coventry Healthy Lifestyles Service, The Canal River Trust and Vagdia & Holms Chartered Architects.

“This small project has now grown, we now have two other partners involved in this project. We have become a group called ‘Project Garden Associates’. We are very lucky to have staff from the Crisis team and from the local architects involved we are certainly getting the business community together.”

Karen says there are going to be more developments taking shape in the near future to include the whole community as well as plans to make the area safer.

“We are now going to adopt the whole area at the end of the building and staff are going to volunteer once a month to help maintain the garden. We will also be encouraging our clients and residents to get involved. We have a nursery behind this building and we hope to involve them at a later date to bring the children and parents down to enjoy the new area.

“We are also looking at how we can make the area feel safer and more open as currently the toilet block within the garden has been boarded for over a year due to unsocial behaviour and vandalism. Our local architect partners are looking at designing a pergola structure to support this. “

The regeneration work of the canal basin has not been the only project Karen has been working on. She’s also part of a research project that has been looking at why some people find it easier to quit smoking than others. It is hoped this research will allow for development of a new product that will have an impact on not only Coventry residents but everyone wanting to kick the habit.

Karen and her team are passionate about helping people make changes that have wider positive impacts on family members and even children and was thrilled to have won the Social Value Contribution Award:

“It’s amazing to have won this award, our journey is just starting, but it is offering up lots of opportunities to work with other organisation and potentially other projects along the canal. The work we are doing in the community is really going places and it is going to get bigger.

“As an organisation we believe in giving back and are firm advocates of championing and empowering others to make better happen. This is done by building confidence, building resilience and supporting people to make changes which support not only the physical but social and mental wellbeing of that person.

"We had our first ground breaking event on the 16 July 2019, a whole afternoon working on the garden. From this we had the equipment and other materials to start offering gardening as an activity on their lifestyle change journey. This is a sign of things to come.”