Bristol, England, UK – 23rd August, 2023 – Marvin Rees, the Mayor of Bristol, visited Torchbox, a purpose lead, B Corp Certified digital agency, and fast-growing, employee-owned (EO) company, to deepen his understanding of EO business models and explore ways the council can proactively assist these unique companies with the challenges they encounter.
Lisa Ballam, head of marketing at Torchbox said:
“At Torchbox, we’re eager to demonstrate how a business can be profitable and responsible when governed by its workers. We invited Marvin to hear about our journey, how EO companies can be socially responsible, and to encourage others thinking about this route succession.”
Over the last four years, Torchbox has transformed from a founder-led team of 60 to a global employee-driven powerhouse of 150 co-owners. This transition has allowed them to challenge the traditional business model and prove that it’s possible to run a respected, progressive, and financially robust company that values its workforce above all.
Torchbox is deeply committed to diversifying its talent pool, minimising its carbon footprint, and exploring sustainable avenues for business expansion in the US.
Torchbox and the Mayor discussed topics including:
Mayor Rees, the Mayor of Bristol, said “It was great to visit the team at Torchbox, and hear about the exciting work being done from their Bristol office. They are another example of the fast-growing and exciting technology sector we have in the city.
“They are doing impressive work, for huge organisations, on an international level. With clients including NASA, Oxfam, the University of Pennsylvania and Tate London, it’s brilliant to see this work coming out of Bristol.
“I’m looking forward to forming a strong working relationship with them and discover ways of integrating Torchboxes’ expertise into Bristol One City, including connecting their academy to more local talented young people.”
James Leavesley, Torchbox CEO adds:
“Torchbox has a thriving office in the heart of Bristol. It was fantastic to meet with Marvin to understand how we can work closer with local schemes to give back to the community and help Torchhbox prosper”
The Mayor’s visit times with recent changes in the employee-ownership landscape, including Jeremy Hunt’s proposed overhaul of employee ownership schemes. While these reforms aim to boost participation in Save as You Earn (SAYE) and Share Incentive Plan (SIP), there’s controversy brewing around the proposed tax crackdown on entrepreneurs who transition their companies to Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs).
Career opportunities are available now across many disciplines at Torchbox. Follow @Torchbox for updates on new opportunities.
References:
Bristol, England, UK – 23rd August, 2023 – Marvin Rees, the Mayor of Bristol, visited Torchbox, a purpose lead, B Corp Certified digital agency, and fast-growing, employee-owned (EO) company, to deepen his understanding of EO business models and explore ways the council can proactively assist these unique companies with the challenges they encounter.
Lisa Ballam, head of marketing at Torchbox said:
“At Torchbox, we’re eager to demonstrate how a business can be profitable and responsible when governed by its workers. We invited Marvin to hear about our journey, how EO companies can be socially responsible, and to encourage others thinking about this route succession.”
Over the last four years, Torchbox has transformed from a founder-led team of 60 to a global employee-driven powerhouse of 150 co-owners. This transition has allowed them to challenge the traditional business model and prove that it’s possible to run a respected, progressive, and financially robust company that values its workforce above all.
Torchbox is deeply committed to diversifying its talent pool, minimising its carbon footprint, and exploring sustainable avenues for business expansion in the US.
Torchbox and the Mayor discussed topics including:
Mayor Rees, the Mayor of Bristol, said “It was great to visit the team at Torchbox, and hear about the exciting work being done from their Bristol office. They are another example of the fast-growing and exciting technology sector we have in the city.
“They are doing impressive work, for huge organisations, on an international level. With clients including NASA, Oxfam, the University of Pennsylvania and Tate London, it’s brilliant to see this work coming out of Bristol.
“I’m looking forward to forming a strong working relationship with them and discover ways of integrating Torchboxes’ expertise into Bristol One City, including connecting their academy to more local talented young people.”
James Leavesley, Torchbox CEO adds:
“Torchbox has a thriving office in the heart of Bristol. It was fantastic to meet with Marvin to understand how we can work closer with local schemes to give back to the community and help Torchhbox prosper”
The Mayor’s visit times with recent changes in the employee-ownership landscape, including Jeremy Hunt’s proposed overhaul of employee ownership schemes. While these reforms aim to boost participation in Save as You Earn (SAYE) and Share Incentive Plan (SIP), there’s controversy brewing around the proposed tax crackdown on entrepreneurs who transition their companies to Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs).
Career opportunities are available now across many disciplines at Torchbox. Follow @Torchbox for updates on new opportunities.
References:
This summer’s arts trail, Unicornfest, will hit the streets of Bristol on Saturday 1st July. This extraordinary event promises to captivate both residents and visitors to the city, as 60 beautifully adorned and crafted unicorn sculptures descend upon the streets of Bristol and surrounding area.
Expect to see the streets come alive with incredible sculpture paintings and designs by the likes of renowned artists such as Bo Lanyon, creator of the much-anticipated Golden Unicorn, and Holy Moly in collaboration with notable sponsors including IKEA, First Bus and Maserati
So, what is happening on the 1st July?
Spanning 55 prominent locations in Bristol and beyond, the arts trail will showcase multiple artists and designs in support of Leukaemia Care.
As part of the 650 Years of Bristol celebrations running this year, after the trail there will be a Farewell to the Unicorns festival at Prop Yard in September followed by an auction of the unicorns in October with proceeds going to the UK charity Leukaemia Care.
The 1st of July will also see sponsor IKEA, host an exciting and free family fun-day event outside their store in Eastville to spread awareness of the trail and collect further donations. As well as displaying two ‘life-sized’ unicorns, they will also be exhibiting a small herd (or blessing as a group of unicorns is known) of smaller unicorn foals, which have been decorated by local schools.
Families are invited to participate in activities such as face painting, experience the fun of a Victorian fair, unicorn racing, and even seize the chance to get a sneak peek at IKEA’s very own unicorns painted and decorated by artists including Amy Magee.
IKEA’s Marketing and Sustainability Manager, Andrias O Shaughnessy, comments: “We’re so excited to be a part of this amazing project. It’s a great opportunity for myself and the rest of the IKEA team to position ourselves as community partners who are very much involved with initiatives like these, and not just as a corporate company.”
Unveiling the Golden Unicorn
Each unicorn has gone through an incredible journey with its artists and sponsors to achieve the final product.
Among these are sculptures painted by Inkie, Cheba and Silent Hobo and the glorious Golden Unicorn, designed by local artist Bo Lanyon as a mystical creature that shimmers in the sunlight, reflecting the light in a beautiful glow.
Bristol-based artist Bo, shares: “It’s been amazing to be part of this project. Creating this unicorn was an incredible journey as I was able to use different techniques like gilding, an ancient technique stretching all the way back to the Egyptians. It’s a meticulous way of working and converting objects into something precious and special.
I’m excited to see the Golden Unicorn take the streets for everyone to see!”
ENDS
About Leukaemia Care
Around 10,000 people per year are diagnosed with leukaemia, and the UK’s leading leukaemia charity, Leukaemia Care, offers support to them all.
For over 50 years, the organisation has ensured that everyone affected receives the best possible diagnosis, information, advice, treatment and support. Their wide range of support services ensures that people get information, practical and emotional support at the times when they need it. This year, they have funded a hospital support worker within Bristol to be on hand at haematology clinics to give advice and signpost services that actively improve the lives of people living with leukaemia.
Unicornfest is set to raise thousands of pounds for the charity to help continue their work in Bristol and beyond.
Get involved
The final few sponsorship opportunities remain. For more information about how to become an event sponsor, visit the Unicornfest website or email Jodie Hancock: [email protected]
Babbasa, the Bristol-based social enterprise, which works to transform the lives of young people from ethnic minority and low-income backgrounds, is celebrating 10 years this month.
Since its founding in 2013, the organisation has helped support over 4,000 people across the city of Bristol, spanning over 60 cultural groups, providing mentoring, skills training and recruitment support to successfully advance their professional ambitions through its network of over 500 cross-industry organisations
This incredible milestone celebration comes following the launch of Babbasa’s ‘OurCity203O’ campaign, which is aiming to support young people from low-income households, starting from inner city Bristol, to secure a median salary role by 2030.
Poku Osei, Founder and CEO of Babbasa, speaks of the organisation’s milestone; “It fills me with immense pride to celebrate a decade of Babbasa. When I started back in 2013 it was with a vision to help create a world where young people living in areas of disadvantage are inspired and able to realise their employment and enterprise ambitions – irrespective of where they live, their nationality, ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, or faith.
“10 years on I am proud to see the thousands of people we have been able to help and how so many of them have developed the skills and confidence to pursue a professional future in roles and industries that interest them.”
Over the last decade Babbasa’s offer has evolved to include recruitment and inclusion services, focused on supporting organisations to diversify their workforce and create inclusive working environments and is now one of the UK’s leading social mobility agencies.
This has included their recent partnership with Bristol Creative Industries to create a city-wide internship programme. The initiative was designed to help young people (18-24yrs) from underrepresented backgrounds into paid roles within the creative sector and has just seen its first cohort of 14 start roles in many of the city’s leading creative businesses.
Poku continues; “While I am proud of the work we have done to date, and the incredible the team and our extended network does every single day, there is still much more to be done.
“The OurCity2030 campaign will be our core focus for the next 10 years as we aim to lift individuals out of poverty, increase representation at the workplace and create new generation of role models for society. It will act as a catalyst for Bristol to become a world class model city for inclusive growth.”
To commemorate the anniversary, Babbasa will be hosting an event as part of St Paul’s Carnival fringe calendar, to celebrate Babbasa alumni and hear about some the amazing success stories from the last decade.
I’ve been reflecting on a day spent with the wonderful people at Mayden recently. For those that don’t know them, Mayden are a Corporate Rebels bucket list organisation who have flattened their hierarchy and embraced agile across all their activities. Needless to time spent with them is always thought provoking.
Sweeping generalisation alert: I wonder if there are only two types of organisations. Those that have recognised the folly and toxicity of the command and control approach to management and rejected it, and those that haven’t.
Now here’s the thing. Most leaders of most organisations would feel that their approach to management was not “command and control.” yet it is only a tiny minority of organisations who are, genuinely, committed to a path where the tacit assumptions that underpin command and control are entirely absent. Indeed, many accepted best practices are built on one or more of those assumptions.
Another way of framing it is to consider which of the following open questions better describes your organisations’ approach to people:
These two questions set you on very different paths, so is there any middle ground? A question I’ll return to.
Bill Gore set up W.L Gore to create an organisation entirely free of bureaucracy. Jos de Blok set-up Buurtzorg to reconnect nurses with the job that they loved and to give their patients the best, personalised care. Chris May developed Mayden with a desire to do something better for its people than follow the herd with conventional management. Although very different in size, sector, era and geography there are spooky similarities in the norms and everyday practices you would find in all three organisations. And I guess we shouldn’t be surprised; if you set-out to create your organisations to fundamentally “work with the grain” of humans; our psychology, sociology, and anthropology we will, by iteration and emergence, arrive in a similar place.
If we set out now to invent the norms and mechanisms of our organisations based on what we know about humans and human performance, what we’d come up with would bear no relation to what we see in most organisations today.
Bill, Jos and Chris all bore the scare tissue of experiencing command and control management and that galvanised them to create something different. Those different “somethings” were all built on very different and better informed assumptions about people. Most of us are not in that situation. The organisations that most of us lead are work in progress, not a blank sheet of paper. Many of us feel that we have inherited a situation which is not of our design, very likely there are bits about it that we don’t like and perceive those bits to be hard to change.
No start-up has ever scaled and flourished into an organisation and got everything right first time. Snags, glitches, wrong calls and failures are inevitable and essential to finding the right path for your unique situation. Even the poster child progressive organisations have had these set-backs along the way, they are quite open about them.
This is perhaps where we find the middle ground, every organisation will have its own level of comfort or discomfort with the conventional approaches to management. The more discomfort there is, the more rapid the evolution will be.
So, assuming you ascribe more to Q1 (How do we create the conditions where people find great intrinsic reward in giving the best of their whole self at work?) than Q2, how do we get started and how quickly can we progress? Here I’m reminded of something that Margaret Heffernan said when speaking with Lisa Gill on her excellent Leadermorphosis podcast.
“…do not think you can think your way to the answer. You can’t, it’s impossible. You have to do something different and see how the system responds. From that you’ve learned something that you can build on. But absolutely, none of us can solve these real world problems in our heads. It’s not physics, it’s not math. It’s human beings working together. And the way people learn to work together, is by working together.”
The practice of experimentation is the key. Experimentation is largely absent in command and control organisations, and woven into just about everyone’s roles in progressive organisations. Based on our research into change-enabled organisations, experimentation is the “how” that applies to the majority of the 26 areas of practice that our research identified.
Experimentation is also, in and of itself, a practice that helps people find great intrinsic reward and creates opportunities for them to give the best of their whole self at work. It is also the engine-room of ever-improving ways of working. So, both the process and the output are accelerants to the evolution.
Absolutely not. Some are more command and control than others, some more human-centric. But if you are committed to a journey from the former to the later, giving people the time, the safe climate, and the autonomy to develop their own safe-to-try experiments will really help build momentum. What’s stopping you from experimenting with it?
The Vitality Index (VI) engenders the habit of experimentation in every team in the organisation. Based on our research, The VI is able to identify the three (out of 26) areas of practice that, if changed will be most beneficial to that specific team at the current moment in time. These insights, in combination with some independent facilitation from us and some inspiration from the Vitality playbook get the teams started on their journey towards ever-better ways of working. This is not just experimentation, this is change that the team own, change that is emergent and responsive and most importantly change that people feel good about.
When you get a quote for an insurance policy to protect your company, you’ll need to provide details of who you are and what you do. We come across business descriptions of all shapes and sizes, including the weird and wonderful. And the more accurate, the better.
In this blog, we’ll unpack why it’s important to make sure your business description is correct, up to date, and matches your activities on your insurance policy.
What is a business description?
When applying for insurance, you’ll need to provide a business description, among other details. This is an explanation of what your business does, including the products or services you offer and how you operate.
Why do insurance companies need this information? They’ll use your business descriptions to understand the specific risks you face in your sector. This informs the level of coverage and the policy cost.
What should a business description include?
You might find it difficult to write an appropriate business description when you deliver multiple services. However, it’s especially important that you explain your business activities accurately and comprehensively. Aim for a broad but precise description that covers all activities, products, and services.
For example, at RiskBox we have several clients who class themselves as a digital agency. They may deal with a diverse range of services, including strategy, graphic design, digital marketing, web design and development, and more. Their business descriptions must cover all these activities so that the insurer is fully aware of what they do.
What happens if you get the business description wrong?
If you don’t provide an accurate business description to the insurance provider, you run several risks, such as:
Therefore, it’s important to provide a thorough and accurate business description when applying for a commercial insurance policy.
Example: an insufficient business description
Let’s say a digital agency specialises in creating websites for small businesses. Their services include everything from graphic design to web development. But when they provide their business description to the insurance company, they only list their logo and business card design services.
Down the line, a client hires the agency to design a new website. But the website isn’t functional, and the client incurs significant financial losses as a result. They sue the agency for compensation, and the agency’s professional indemnity insurance policy is called upon to cover the legal costs and any settlement or judgement amounts.
Yet, because the business description initially provided didn’t accurately reflect the full scope of the agency’s website design services, the insurers would reject their claim. As a result, the agency must pay for the legal costs and any settlement or judgement amounts out of pocket, which could be financially devastating.
So, what’s the best way to prevent problems?
Whether you’re taking out a new insurance policy or updating your coverage, you must make sure you’re clear and accurate about what you actually do.
The best approach is to break down every area of work in your business – no matter how big or small – and calculate the percentage of turnover generated in each. Then, your broker or insurer can help make sure the description is sufficient to cover your business activities and services.
I’m concerned my business description is incorrect, what can I do?
If you think your business description may be inaccurate, contact a broker or insurer right away. They can update the description and issue you the revised documentation to give you peace of mind – and, importantly, protect your business.
For a specialist’s opinion, or to have someone double-check your business description, get in touch with our friendly team. You can reach us on 0161 533 0411, at [email protected], or by filling in our online contact form.
Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash
Share space with other creatives in the centre of Bath. Just £200 per month plus VAT will let you have a desk in an open plan office (well, as open plan as an old Georgian office allows!), meeting room, heating (yes – we know that’s really important!), lighting, all the tea and coffee you can drink (yes – that’s important too!) and a bit of light banter.
Our offices are just off Queen Square, which is handy for the pubs and shops, railway station, bikes and anything else except cars.
Our friends at The Wow Company have launched BenchPress 2023. With agencies of all sizes participating, BenchPress is the largest survey of independent agency owners in the UK.
It’s the perfect opportunity for Bristol Creative Industries members to benchmark themselves against their peers and build a picture of the latest trends impacting agencies across the country.
By taking part this year you’ll be able to compare yourself in several key areas:
You’ll discover what the top performers do differently – insights that have the power to transform your agency.
Sooner or later, almost every agency owner will ask the question – how does my agency compare with others? Each year, BenchPress answers this question by surveying hundreds of agency owners. Everyone that takes part will receive a copy of the full benchmark results plus the chance to secure free early bird tickets to the launch event in March. If you haven’t seen a report before, here’s the 2022 report.
The survey takes about 15 minutes to complete so grab yourself a cuppa and get started.
One of the big benefits of Bristol Creative Industries membership is the ability to self-publish content on our website. We’ve seen lots of great content published in 2022 including some brilliant business advice. Here are the 20 most popular advice posts of the year.
Want to publish business advice on our website and make the top 20 next year? Become a member of Bristol Creative Industries.
Written by JX Branding / Joanna Xenofontos
Click below or read the article here.
The role of brand architecture in Facebook’s rebrand to Meta
Written by Varn
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Written by Adapt
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Written by AMBITIOUS
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Written by Fiasco Design
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Written by saintnicks
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Written by Ginkgo Business Development
Click below or read the article here.
Written by Synergist
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Written by Ryan Webb Consultancy Ltd
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The advantages of becoming a B Corp: 9 reasons you should do the “impact assessment” now
Written by Flourish
Click below or read the article here.
10 things the Flourish creative team learned at TwitchCon Amsterdam 2022
Written by AMBITIOUS
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Written by Tom Fallowfield (Ugli)
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Written by Armadillo
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Why Performance Marketing without a Performance Mindset isn’t Enough in 2022
Written by Turnhouse Marketing
Click below or read the article here.
Written by Adapt
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Written by Carnsight Communications
Click below or read the article here.
Written by AMBITIOUS
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Written by saintnicks
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Written by Future Shift
Click below or read the article here.
How to Spot Greenwash in Sustainability Reporting: A Beginner’s Guide
Written by Episode Two
Click below and read the article here.
Want to publish business advice on our website and make the top 20 next year? Become a member of Bristol Creative Industries.
The track was steep, half grass half loose rock. It had peaks and troughs and was designed to keep hatchback cars like ours at bay. Our suspension was low to the ground due to the camera gear we’d crammed in the boot. Thud, scrape, rev, thud, scrape, rev. We zigzagged up the path. This was not how we’d imagined our first bee hunt. Either side of us were broccoli fields, freshly sprouting, the ocean visible just over the far hedges. Cornwall has an ability to take you from the known to the unknown very quickly. We drew into a small National Trust farm where the team from Buglife International, an organization ‘protecting the tiny things that make the world work’, were gathered. Their giant bee nets poking from their backpacks and binoculars hanging from their necks.
We were here on a very specific mission to find and film one of the UK’s rarest bees, the Large Scabious Mining Bee. This mining bee, amongst others, is a focus point of a county wide conservation project called The North Cornwall B Line that’s creating pollinator corridors stretching the length of the South West of England. A solitary mining bee lives, as the name suggests, by itself, they usually live in burrows, instead of in a hive, eighty percent of UK bees are bees of this kind. They come in all shapes, sizes and colors. Some of them, the nomad bees, lay their eggs in other bees’ nests, they’re the cuckoo of the bee world. Solitary bee populations, like most insects in the UK, are plummeting. We used to have 4 species of scabious bee in Cornwall, we now only have one… and it’s only found on the location we were visiting today.
Bees are fast, unpredictable and small – that makes them a hard subject to film. We were lucky in a way that our bees feed on a single flower and are isolated to a small patch of land, that should narrow the hunt down. We were told in advance that we’d be lucky to see any bees let alone get any film of them. Their numbers are so low, and their activity governed strictly by the wind and temperature, that it was a complete roll of the dice. We did our final checks and packed a large antique magnifying glass into our back pocket before setting off on our way.
We followed the team into a swathe of seeded grass freckled with wildflowers. Looking back you could see the old farm land we drove through to get here. A patchwork of dark brown earth with lines of well behaved vegetables. This is Cornwall, next to no trees, 75% managed for agricultural use and 8% is urban area. It comes as no surprise then that breeding birds and mammals are found in only half as many places as they were 30 years ago, butterflies are found in even fewer places. Though this may make you despair, there is plenty of hope. Nature hangs on in the most unexpected places. Looking across the fields you see wild shrubby hedge rows and triangular islands of life where three fields meet, safe from the plow. It’s so easy to see what people mean by islands of biodiversity and when they speak about the need for wildlife corridors to connect them up.
As we walked, butterflies of all kinds fluttered inches above the sward, weightless, beating, still. Evidence of regenerative work was everywhere to be seen. Baby saplings, 10 trees thick, ran along the furthest field margin that backed onto the sea cliffs – a site of specific scientific interest (SSSI). “They told us trees couldn’t grow here… too windy they said… They look perfectly good to me. We’re trying to give the landscape a little shelter and to increase the width of the shrub from the sea cliffs to the meadows.” said Nick Holden, a National Trust lead ranger and our guide, Nick continued, “The fields we were walking on used to be just like the broccoli fields down below. It’s taken years of seeding and regenerative grazing to return the meadows to what you see now. There’s plenty more work to be done, mind.”. As we walked Nick spoke to us of the different wildflowers that had been sown and how their roots permeate to different depths. A technique often used to kickstart the development of health topsoil.
“Well here we are”, Nick gestured for us to walk through a final gate into a sprawling broccoli field. Behind the gate the land dropped away revealing Godrevey headland. The famous lighthouse stood framed between two sea cliffs and the beach stretched to the West. It was beautiful. “Not much is it” Nick said, we noticed he was staring down to the ground to a patch of wildflowers no more than 5 meters thick. This thin belt ran the length of the broccoli field. The Buglife team had already got their nets out and were walking along this patch as if they were looking for a dropped coin, legs straight, back bowed, concentrated. “This is the spot, if you’re gonna have any luck finding the bees it will be here” Nick put a hand out and invited us to take a look.
Little blue flowers littered the margin, their delicate frames improbable against the sea winds. “So this is the field scabious” Laura said kneeling down beside the plants. Laura is head of the North Cornwall B Line project and was the person who had invited us to the bee hunt. “We spent all last summer collecting seeds and have started a makeshift nursery in Paddy’s garden,” Laura pointed at Paddy, the lead Entomologist (an insect expert), as he wafted his net across the verge. Laura continued, “We have well over 500 seedlings now which we’re hoping to plant across the fields you just walked across, the idea is to connect this small patch of flowers with another patch further down the valley”. Solitary bees face a challenge in our great expanses of farmed landscape. Unlike their social friends the honey bees, who will often fly up to distances of 5 miles to find food, solitary bees will fly no further than 200 meters from their nesting sites. You can imagine how easy it would be for an unsuspecting farmer to remove a small corner of scrub, just like the one we’re standing in now, and in the process remove a nearby food source, stepping stone or final stronghold.
There would be two approaches; the stake out, in which a person sits, camera on tripod, aiming at a patch of flowers in the hope of a bee encounter, then there’s the run and gun, where a cameraman, camera in hand, runs along the verge opportunistically poaching a shot here, a shot there. We began with option one, camera steadfast, tripod engaged. Then we waited. And we waited. And we… “Oh bee”, shouted Paddy from the bottom of the field, the net swooped twice, figure of eight style, paddy, knee deep in a sea of blue, flung the net over his own head to inspect his catch. He reappeared holding a small translucent tube in his hand, he had a bee. The bee was the size of a one pee coin, jet black, with two huge balls of bright pink pollen on its legs. It was perfect. I felt a sense of wonder, how could I find something so new, so rare, amongst a place that looks so normal. I was hooked, part by the search for the next bee and part by the idea of what else could be here.
We spent the rest of the day foraging for bees and butterflies. In total, 8 Scabious Mining Bees were seen. The image of Ollie, our cameraman, and Adam, his assistant, leaning into a hedge, Ollie holding a camera, and Adam pressing a magnifying glass to the end of his lens will forever stay in my mind. Wildlife can do that to people, it draws you in, strips back the rubbish and brings out the inner kid. Throughout the day we were reminded by Paddy just how uncommon it was to see so many bees. The thing is, this was year two of their project, with the first load of new scabious flowers already blooming. Conservation takes patience, conservationists don’t speak in days or months, they speak in years, and this project was two years in the making. There’s the councils, the big organizations, farmers and private landowners, there’s the experts, the volunteers and the staff to keep it ticking. It takes all of that, for days like today.
After a series of interviews amongst the bees, we set off on our journey home. Laura told us about the national B Line project taking place and how the North Cornwall project was a small part of a much bigger initiative. In total they aim to engage 150,000 hectares of land, that’s over 210,000 football pitches, across the whole of the UK. That’s an area roughly the same size as London. What’s most amazing about it is they’re doing all of it without owning any land. This is about people sitting down with other people and saying “we have a plan… are you in”. We left the day feeling optimistic about the future. We’d seen our bee, now we needed to make a film to tell their story.