About the Film

Nextdoor Nature Northumberland was an 18-month programme run by Northumberland Wildlife Trust, supporting communities to take action for nature across a wide stretch of the Northumberland coast — from Amble and the Hauxley Wildlife Discovery Centre in the south, up to Berwick-upon-Tweed in the north. This community nature film follows the project team and the volunteers, groups and individuals they worked with, documenting what happens when people are given practical support to do something for the natural world on their doorstep.

The project had three main strands: supporting community action for nature; building green skills through events and training; and creating two-year traineeships for young people based at Hauxley Wildlife Discovery Centre. By the end of the project, the team had reached more than 2,500 people, supported 12 community projects and delivered 120 events, activities and training sessions. They helped sow 4kg of native wildflower seed, plant 5,000 spring bulbs across Hauxley Parish, create two new ponds, and install more than 50 bird and bat boxes, bug hotels and hedgehog houses across the county.

“The main one is to support community action for nature. A lot of groups are already doing things in the spaces where they live, and so being able to support things that are already going on is really important to us.” — Natasha Hemsley, Nextdoor Nature Northumberland Officer

Listening First

What comes through clearly in this community nature film is the approach the team took from the start: listening before acting. Rather than arriving with a fixed programme, Natasha Hemsley, Callum Donnelly and Raven Montague worked to understand what each community group actually needed, then found ways to help that fitted their situation. That might mean funding, practical advice, bringing in expertise, connecting groups to each other, or simply showing up and working alongside people.

One of the projects documented in the film is a community and memorial garden, built with a group that wanted to transform an unused space. The Wildlife Trust provided investment, plants and labour — and the group did the rest.

“The aim of the project is to support them in the ways that they need help. So rather than just kind of diagnosing the problems, we really come in and listen to the problems that they have and try and support them in a way that works for them.” — Callum Donnelly, Trainee Communities Assistant

“They’ve turned up and I’ve bought plants, regenerated the place, and they’ve just come and work like Trojans with us. So it’s been fantastic. It’s been the best thing that’s happened over year.” — Volunteer

Community, Confidence and Nature

Several of the people who appear in this community nature film speak about the project in terms that go beyond conservation outcomes: the friendships formed, the confidence built, the sense of contributing to something larger than a single garden or riverbank. The Northumberland Recovery College memorial garden in Berwick — a pollinator-friendly space created in memory of group members who have passed away — is one example. Volunteers working on wildflower meadows, river water quality testing and community litter picks along the Amble coast are others.

“I can feel that I’ve made a difference over people’s lives and really helped benefit them, but also nature at the same time.” — Raven Montague, Trainee Communities Assistant

“It’s been a joyous thing, and people have attended more, people are more motivated, more invigorated. It gives us something to focus on other than our addictions.” — Volunteer

“What I really hope that people take away from this project, the communities that we’ve worked with especially, is that there are other people out there that have the same thoughts and passions and feelings towards nature as they do, and if people come together in that community spirit, that’s what’s really going to drive nature recovery.” — Callum Donnelly

Filming Community Action for Nature

This community nature film presented a different kind of documentary challenge from a single-subject conservation project. The Nextdoor Nature Northumberland team was working across a large geographic area — a coastal strip of more than sixty miles — with a wide range of community groups, each at a different stage and working on different things. The film needed to hold that breadth together without losing the human detail that makes each project feel specific and real.

What the transcript and the footage kept returning to was the relationship between doing something for nature and doing something for people. Volunteers described feeling more connected, more purposeful, more confident. Trainees described overcoming anxiety through exactly the kind of outward-facing community work that had initially seemed daunting. The film tries to hold both sides of that exchange — the ecological and the personal — without privileging one over the other. That balance is what makes a community nature film like this harder to make than a single-focus conservation documentary — and more rewarding when it works.