Nature’s Canvas: A Multicultural Memory Cafe by St Mary’s Woodford

Walking into the hall, you might be forgiven for thinking that you’d walked into a woodland glade. However, alongside birdsong, bunches of wild flowers, and bundles of bare winter sticks, there is also the warm buzz of conversation, as people share a cup of tea, a slice of cake, and their memories of nature from years past.

This is our nature based memory café at St Mary’s, Woodford, an offering for those living with dementia and the folk who love and care for them. It provides a comfortable space for gentle conversation, for them to connect once again through the medium of nature, those things that have been important for them over the years, those things that are familiar and follow a well worn pattern over the course of the year.

As a forest school practitioner, I am well aware of the benefits of nature to mental health and wellbeing. So called ‘green space time’ improves mood and resilience. Most of my work has been with children and families, and yet I wondered how curating access to nature might also impact on those living with dementia and those caring for them.

Thanks to Colours of Redbridge, we have been able to explore this and make it a reality. We applied for and were successful in winning funding which allowed us to dream a memory café into being. Most of my forest school work to date has been nestled within the woodland itself; working with these vulnerable older people meant finding a new and different way to give them access to nature. Often, they are unsteady on their feet- clambering through woodland wouldn’t be possible. Often, they are physically frail- sitting outside in all weathers would exclude the very people we were seeking to reach. How could we create a woodland feel, but inside, with comfortable chairs and easy cups of tea? How could we curate this access to nature in an authentic way, but in a safe warm setting?Shorten with AI

We brought together a small group of forest school facilitators to help plan and deliver the sessions and approached our friends at South Woodford Islamic Centre and Essex and East London Synagogue for volunteer support. Colours of Redbridge supported us with advice and suggestions for people we could contact and places we could advertise these free sessions. Their contact with us always felt supportive and gave us confidence that what we were creating was something worthwhile and useful for the area.

The time scale on the project was short from winning the funding to delivery, so we had to quickly write risk assessments and get the details firmed up. We began with a soft launch in early December. Despite our attempts to share the news of it in all the right places, no participants turned up. Nevertheless, we embraced this opportunity for a dummy run. We knew how it would work in the space, we took the time to do some forward planning, to enjoy the nature activity with the volunteers we had, so that they knew how a session would run when doing it with participants for real. This was such a useful experience that it was as if we’d planned it this way!Shorten with AI

The numbers attending the memory café are small but are growing session on session. It has been lovely to see the warmth within the group, between participants and volunteers. The volunteers have enjoyed the project at least as much as the participants, with so many memories from childhood and early adulthood shared by everyone, sparked by the natural objects on the tables ready to be explored.

As we aren’t managing the kind of numerical reach we had hoped for by this stage in the project, we are now exploring bringing our memory café into local care homes to reach a wider demographic. We are also exploring how best to share these wonderful nature memories that the project has brought out of the participants- maybe through some kind of storytelling piece of art.

We have been so grateful for the ongoing support from Colours of Redbridge, and have been having a lot of fun with the project. Nature connection is so important for all of us, and we are so blessed to live in such a green borough. We are looking forward with interest to the way the project appears to be shifting form and providing a little snippet of woodland glade to even more Redbridge residents, nudging those feel-good memories and allowing us to enjoy our common connection with those green growing things around us all.