The Green AWARE Project

In November 2023, 6 months into my maternity leave, I tentatively opened an email from ESRC on my phone. I’d been hiding in blissful ignorance from my work emails since April, but I’d redirected my Je-S emails to my gmail account, on the remote chance that the funding application I’d frantically managed to submit the week before I signed off work actually paid off. And it did! Jumping up and down, I hastily forwarded the email to Anna, the co-investigator on application.

In June, shortly after returning to work, we launched the Green AWARE Project, and I quickly became daunted by the prospect of actually having to execute all the activities I had naively claimed to the Council that the funding would enable me to achieve.

The Green AWARE Project Logo

Getting your first PI project can, in turns out, be simultaneously very exciting and incredibly overwhelming. Since submitting my PhD thesis in 2019, I’ve applied for multiple grants, and become increasingly disheartened by putting in months of preparation, building prospective collaborations and coming up with creative research methods, only to face yet another rejection. The focus on greenspace, inequality, and wellbeing has stayed central to all my proposals, and I’m not sure exactly what changed this time to make the bid successful. It felt like a long 5 years to be skirting around my main research passion, dipping into it where I could, but mostly focussed on supporting side projects as a Co-I alongside the teaching aspects of my role. It’s been a long time coming, meaning there’s a lot of emotion tied to be finally leading my own project again, in an area that I’m passionate about- and this time with a research team too.

Jennie joined us a Research Fellow in October, and has been delivering a rapid evidence review, supporting our survey development, and designing some amazingly creative advertising materials for our public launch.

So what exactly is this project I’ve been ranting about for the past few minutes?! The Green AWARE project focusses on understanding Access, Wellbeing, and Resident Equality (hence the punny title), combining a new survey with focus groups and geospatial analysis, to improve our understanding of greenspace accessibility. Using Leeds and Bradford cities as our case study areas, we hope that by hearing from both those who do and don’t (frequently) use parks, we can gain new insights into the unique physical and social barriers faced by different parts of our communities. We’ll especially be focussing on the experiences of groups we know are already vulnerable to exclusion in public places: women, ethnic minorities, disabled people, older adults, and those in more deprived areas.

Poster with the Green AWARE Survey design

After the survey, we’ll combine this information with spatial data, to compare subjective insights with objective indicators of greenspace accessibility, to really understand where and how residents are facing challenges in using greenspaces. We’ll then dive deeper into some of these issues with a series of focus groups, to explore the lived experiences of different communities.

These findings will add to the academic literature around intersectional inequalities, but most importantly, will enabled us, alongside our partners at Leeds and Bradford councils, to take steps to widen inclusion to meet the needs of our fantastic, diverse, local communities, and that can help to improve the whole populations’ mental health and wellbeing.

The survey launches in just a couple of weeks, and it’s been a much more complicated process than I could have anticipated to design, pilot, and build the online survey, as well as supporting a sampling strategy for our targeted mail out. Mostly though, it’s really exciting to see our team’s hard work start to pay off- and I’m really proud of how much we’ve done so far.

More details on the survey and project progress coming soon!