Together for Nature Festival, Hodge Hill Church, Footsteps GrassRoutes community launch!
Footsteps and Bahu Trust combined with Hodge Hill Church in November 2024 to launch GrassRoutes, our Birmingham faith community-based eco-action initiative. Hodge Hill Church is an ecumenical partnership between the Church of England and the United Reform Church, with the vicar, Al Barrett working closely with the local community and mosques. The Festival was full of energy and a great GrassRoutes launch, Footsteps’ Chris Martin commented.
Rev Al Barrett, a long-standing friend of Footsteps, has been Anglican priest at the church since 2010. Local MP for Hodge Hill and Solihull North Liam Byrne spoke, and Kamran Shezad of the Balsall Heath-based Muslim educational charity the Bahu Trust delivered the keynote address.
The Festival was an opportunity to build links in East Birmingham with worshippers of diverse faith backgrounds, and to publicise the eco-action project grants available through the GrassRoutes collaboration between Footsteps, the Bahu Trust and Ashden to build faith groups’ capacity to lead and advocate for community-led climate action.
Kamran Shezad led workshops in the morning and afternoon to explain the criteria for the grants and the hopes and vision for the project, funded by the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation under the auspices of the Birmingham Faith Climate Action Partnership.
There were other break-out sessions through the day on connecting with nature – one led by Footsteps’ Toqueer Quyyam and Fanniza (Fizz) Begum of Birmingham Community Support CIC, another by the Wildlife Trust’s Holly King; about energy-saving in homes and faith buildings, with Footsteps’ Chris Martin, Tasawar Bashir of the MECC Trust and Ben Smith, Net Zero Carbon Project Manager for the Diocese of Birmingham; and a workshop with Sofia Browse-Silvestro of youth advocacy organisation Uprising, introducing their Environmental Leadership Programme.
An exhibition ran through the day in the main worship space with stalls for city-wide and local organisations including the BrumEnergy initiative, Transport for West Midlands and Friends of Hodge Hill Common. The church garden was open to showcase the range of green initiatives introduced there such as composting and an insect hotel.
Introducing proceedings, Al Barrett talked about his relationship with the local landscape, the impact of fatherhood and the pandemic on his environmental outlook, and the sustainability work undertaken at the church. Educator and theatre facilitator Soobie Whitfield described her personal connectivity to nature and how worship and community life at Hodge Hill Church embraces the natural world. Balbir Seimar of Hindu Forum Walsall and World Against Single Use Plastic (WASUP) spoke about traditional and present day Hindu approaches to nature and climate action.
Liam Byrne said he would carry messages he heard in Hodge Hill with him when he went to Baku the following weekend for COP29. He talked about how world poverty is now “intimately entwined” with tackling climate change, with the poorest people most vulnerable to the impact of increasing carbon emissions, and his aspiration for East Birmingham to be a model for engaging communities on climate and sustainability plans.
In his keynote, Kamran Shezad spoke about the essential character of Footsteps as a group that empowers others and is action-orientated; and about the vital role of faith groups to convene all sections of the community and to build trust. “We are the social capital that politicians need,” he said.
Balbir Seimar said she thought people attending the festival were “showing more passion than usual. There’s been a lot of useful networking”.
She said a proposal from Footsteps to get people litter-picking had benefits for health and wellbeing, and through a photo record of the sessions could help participants feel valued.
Worshipper and volunteer at Hodge Hill Church Louise Rochfort said the festival was
“really good, there have been great conversations and info [given out]. I would definitely come to another one”
Abdul Ali from Alum Rock who describes himself as being “from a secular religious background” said he thought there was “good work going on” around climate action and associated community initiatives in the city. “It needs support and publicity,” he said.
Abida from Ward End, who came with Fizz Begum said:
“As a single mum with three children, it’s really hard to have a lovely warm day out together. I have no [wider] family at all, so having this opportunity to bond with others was so important—not just for me, but for my children as well.
“The event was fascinating, with different activities focused on our Earth and the environment, which are very important to me and my children. We all felt so welcomed, and it truly meant a lot to us. I’m really looking forward to the next event”.
Joy Curtis, a worshipper at the church who lives in Castle Vale, said:
“What was so lovely on the day was that we had a meeting with like-minded people – Muslims, Sikhs and other religions. Taking care of what we have on the planet underpins everything we stand for. When you interact with each other, you learn a lot more.
“We really didn’t know there was funding available – I didn’t know there was so much expertise out there, funding, knowledge, so much of everything, that we can use to further our interest. We’re an Eco Church, we’ve already got our Bronze and Silver, we’re going for Gold – we’re going all out. We’re part of a community and the community has a wealth of interests that we can utilise to meet our goals. That exchange and interchange of ideas: we can only succeed, we can’t go backwards.
“The church garden is our little pride and joy. That garden means so much to us. There’s a group of volunteers who work every week in the garden without fail – they plant, they sow, they reap.
“It’s not just for humans. We encourage all the creatures of the earth to share and enjoy There’s a bug hotel and we have been out counting the weeds and flowers. Everything you can think of in God’s creation has been encouraged in the garden. We co-exist from time to time: that’s what God intended for us.
“If we look after the little plot that we have, we can look after others, and others can look after us. We’re all in this together, it’s not just a one man or a one church thing. We can’t do everything, we can only do our little bit – we can bring our little bits together and bring about change”.
Sue Hodgetts, who was volunteering in the church garden said the festival was
“great. It was good to have lots of like-minded people together.
“There was a lovely atmosphere in the church – all different religious backgrounds together”.
Allannah Brennan from Hodge Hill volunteers with the Cub pack at the church and has got them involved with environmentally-conscious activities, such as cutting back on bottled water and learning to identify garden birds.
“I enjoyed the atmosphere and learned stuff,” she says. “The three speakers were really good. I liked the fact Liam came, it gave the festival credibility. I met people I haven’t seen for years. People were interested in the stalls”.
Birmingham Friends of the Earth volunteer Malika Kaushik, a graduate student from India, was attending her first nature event of this kind in the UK.
“The Together for Nature festival was a great initiative to foster meaningful discussions on environmental collaboration,” Kaushik says. “I truly appreciated the opportunity to engage with faith communities like Footsteps and other passionate environment organisations to explore actionable solutions for a greener future.
“The interactive workshops and keynote speeches were inspiring and reinforced in me the power of community-led eco-action!”
Libby Harris, Campaigns Supporter Worker at Birmingham Friends of the Earth, says:
“The festival was an excellent opportunity for Birmingham Friends of the Earth to engage residents in our climate campaigns. Hodge Hill is one of our target constituencies so it was great to have the opportunity to engage with local people. We were pleased that a lot of attendees signed our petition.
“There was a broad range of organisations, so we were able to catch up with allies and make new connections. The workshops provided a great opportunity to explore community-led action.
“We had been trying to engage Liam Byrne with our campaigns for some time and through his talk at the event, we gained a better understanding of his priorities and since the event he agreed to meet with us [in January]”.