It was an outstanding achievement for Let’s Walk Bristol to come away with the highly commended award in the Green category at the recent NHS South West Integrated Personalised Care Awards.
To come second in the whole of the South West region, competing with organisations with a very different infrastructures, staff sizes, and budgets was testament to our community-centred approach and the dedication of our team.
Evidence shows that nature spaces aren’t accessed equally by everyone. People from ethnic minority backgrounds, older people, and people living in low-income areas are all groups under-represented in nature in the UK*. Inequality and access to nature exacerbates the health inequalities experienced by these communities and Let’s Walk Bristol was recognised by the judges as an example of how social prescribing and community-based support can address this.
Our team represents the groups we are trying to encourage into our local parks and to connect with nature. We actively seek to engage people from minority ethnic communities to Nordic walk and 80% of our leadership team are visibly minority ethnic, representing local Chinese, Sri Lankan, Indian, Carribean, and Somali communities and speaking their languages.
We know that many people from minority ethnic communities are less likely to access the primary care system so we focus on direct community engagement as well as working with GPs, health links teams and social prescribers. The statistics from our funded programmes speak for themselves. In our first year alone 70% of the 92 participants on our courses were people from culturally diverse communities, 18 different ethnicities were represented in our groups, and we recorded 22 different prescribing routes. Since then our instructors have provided dedicated programmes for the Chinese community, Bangladesh Men’s Association, and Nilaari, the black led mental health charity, as well as establishing regular low-cost Nordic walking classes for our course graduates.
Our team also represents older adults (another group under-represented in nature). We’ve trained instructors in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. Thanks to the support of the Grateful Society, a local Bristol charity, we have established a dedicated group for older adults which is now a self-sustaining community group, meeting in a local community park, led by members of the community.
These groups make a direct difference to people’s health, not just physical but mental. Since 2023 we have been using the ONS Happiness and Anxiety Scale and the self-reported personal well-being outcomes showed a 27% increase in happiness and a 53% decrease in anxiety. It was something the judges were particularly impressed by.
So thank you to SWIPC for recognising that micro-organisations like ours can have a big impact and make a difference.
Most of all, thank you to our wonderful community of Nordic walkers without whose support this award would not have been possible.
