Adventure Close to Home

Small grants that kept local activity centres and holiday clubs affordable, so children in deprived areas could get outdoors without leaving home.

Not every outdoor grant pays for a trip away. In some of England's most deprived areas, the harder job is keeping the door open close to home: a canoe club by the local water, a holiday club in the nearest patch of woodland, a box of activities through the letterbox when even that isn't possible.

A local charity keeps the door open

Wildside Activity Centre runs a canoe club for young people aged 12 to 17 in Wolverhampton, one of the most deprived local authorities in England. With over 20 volunteers but no funding to pay qualified water sports staff, the charity relied on a grant to run a six-week course working towards a Paddle Power qualification, the first step towards becoming a qualified canoe coach, while keeping costs low enough for participants with little access to sport or the outdoors to take part, including young people with disabilities.

Hollingworth Lake Activity Centre in Rochdale does something similar for schools that don't have the on-site facilities to run outdoor education themselves. Subsidised sessions in adventure sports give pupils skills and confidence that a gymnasium or basketball court can't, removing the cost as a reason a school might otherwise say no.

When even that's out of reach

ecobirmingham built its Wild Holiday Bunch around exactly this problem: a lack of outdoor, creative holiday clubs in the city. A grant let the charity offer subsidised or fully funded places, and three-quarters of the 34 children who took part came from low-income families who couldn't otherwise have afforded to go. They lit campfires, learned to carve with pen knives and spent whole days outdoors building the kind of confidence and knowledge of their own local site that a single afternoon can't give.

When in-person sessions became difficult to run, ecobirmingham didn't stop. Working with the Friends of Masefield community garden, they turned the Wild Bunch into a box scheme: clay, seeds, fabric paint and everything else a family needed to keep exploring nature from home, delivered to children in a deprived part of South Birmingham who didn't have a garden of their own. As restrictions eased, the boxes became a way back in, drawing families to the community garden to share what they'd made, ask the volunteer gardeners for tips, and find somewhere to plant their seedlings.

None of this needed a residential or a trip abroad. It needed a local charity with the funding to keep its own door open. Find out how to apply.