Creative Harbour CIC
Planet: Protecting nature
We wish to develop our ShoreClean initiative to reach more people across our communities, help protect the natural environment of Portsmouth and Langstone Harbours, and celebrate our marine culture.
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About this cause
We create meaningful cultural experiences for the communities of Portsmouth and Langstone Harbours, infusing environmentalism and generosity of spirit into everything we do. We are currently seeking support to develop our ShoreClean programme, which started as a modest beach cleaning exercise and over the last two years has grown in complexity and opportunity. We work with refugees, local residents, schools, artists and technologists to facilitate ShoreCleans across the most forgotten corners of our harbour landscape. This next phase of ShoreClean would focus on overlaying more meaningful cultural, heritage, arts and environmental learning outcomes for our participants, being able to kit out the ShoreCleans in a safer and more appropriate way, and widening the reach of the project.
How this cause brings people in the community together
We know from our previous projects that bringing our communities closer to nature has been beneficial for everyone, for mental wellbeing, connectedness and cohesion. ShoreClean adds more benefits: social interactions that occur in a way that doesn't happen easily in other settings; and the activity throws up numerous stories and ideas in terms of heritage, environmentalism and intergenerational understanding. We're looking to spread the benefits to a wider group of people, and to give local creatives the opportunity to respond to the themes of the events too. Indeed, we've found that many harder-to-reach individuals respond enthusiastically to creative activities, for example adding a photography or drawing dimension to each ShoreClean. There's lots to build on.