WHAT?

Join UK Pocket Parks and partners for an immersive, action-focused workshop designed to unblock barriers to delivering climate adaptation at the local level and drive change in your organisation. Through practical sessions, expert-led provocations, and collaborative activities, we’ll explore how to shift from intention to implementation—building more agile, impactful urban greening programmes.

Expect a candid, supportive environment where we ask not just what if?—but how?

WHO?

This workshop is tailored for senior local authority officers and budget-holders across departments including:

Land & Asset Management

Highways & Cleansing

Public Protection

Planning & Housing

Parks & Greenspaces

Health, Safety & Equalities

Community Engagement & Public Health

Attendance will be balanced across disciplines to ensure a diversity of perspectives and maximise peer learning.

WHY ATTEND?

You will leave with:

Deeper understanding of the practicalities and opportunities for delivering pocket parks
Tools to identify and shift organisational blocks
Greater confidence to influence change internally
Insights into alternative finance models, social value frameworks, and stewardship pathways
A tailored action plan for your local context

AGENDA

9:30am | Arrivals, Coffee & Networking

10:00am | Welcome & Opening Words

Kim Poku, Local Resident
Charlotte Glazier, UK Pocket Parks
Prof. Prashant Kumar, RECLAIM, University of Surrey

10:30am | Peacock Street Pocket Park: 15-Year Retrospective

Juliet Quintero (DPQ) and Charlotte Glazier share their stories and reflections of realising the Peacock Street Pocket Park followed by Q&A.

11:30am | Break

11:45am | Blocks & Breakthroughs

Reflect on challenges in your role and explore opportunities through facilitated group work and provocations from expert facilitators.

1:00pm | Lunch & Networking

1:45pm | Unblocking Finance

Case Study: Green Infrastructure Tokens – Mike Webb (WMCA)

Group reflection and application

2:30pm | Comfort Break

2:45pm | Unblocking Social Value

Video from HACT followed by team-based reflection and discussion

3:30pm | Group Sharing & Reflections

4:00pm | Action Planning

Develop a personal or team-based roadmap for delivery

4:30pm | Workshop Close

5:00pm | Optional Site Visit: Peacock Street Pocket Park

(Approx. 1–1.5 hours, details shared on the day)

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

Opening Words: Kim Poku, local resident

Growing up in Ghana, I was immersed in nature as fresh produce and medicinal plants were central to daily life. Moving to London exposed me to a different reality, where access to green space was more limited, especially for marginalised communities. As a volunteer at Bankside Open Spaces Trust, I was able to take part in gardening with local residents to enhance their living environment, which helped foster a sense of community. I witnessed firsthand how green spaces can transform neighbourhoods and bring people together.

Event host : Charlotte Glazier, Director, UK Pockets Parks

Charlotte Glazier is the Founding Director of UK Pocket Parks and creator of www.investinature.org With a background in landscape architecture and local government, she champions nature-based urban climate adaptation. She’s pioneered and led programmes ‘Islington Greener Together’ and the NEIRF-funded ‘Green Finance for Islington Pocket Park Framework’, which featured in the London Climate Resilience Review. Charlotte’s work focuses on unlocking new funding models for green and blue infrastructure and empowering innovative community stewardship models. Strategic and visionary, she is building the social impact case for long-term investment in climate resilience and continues to drive innovation in local urban climate adaptation with purpose and urgency.

Professor Prashant Kumar, University of Surrey, RECLAIM

Prof Prashant Kumar is a founding Co-Director of the pan-university Institute for Sustainability, Professor & Chair in Air Quality and Health, founding Director of the internationally-leading research centre Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE) and lead PI on the UKRI (EPSRC, NERC, AHRC) funded RECLAIM Network Plus at the University of Surrey, UK. He is the founder of successfully running Guildford Living Lab, a Trustee at Zero Carbon Guildford (ZERO), an Adjunct Professor at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland; and a Guest Professor at Southeast University, China.

Juliet Quintero, Founder DPQ

Juliet is passionate about engaging communities and seeking out potential opportunities of employing art, new technology and design to create better places. She looks to reinvent the built environment as a vibrant hub of creativity, diversity and culture.

She has a keen interest in the arts and has led several prominent Public Art projects, both as designer and commissioner, and has also undertaken strategic cultural visioning for Birmingham, Watford and Haringey. Juliet has developed lasting relationships with clients, collaborators and fabricators and has developed a strong network of associates. Many of her public art projects have specifically sought to engage young people throughout the design process.

When she’s not in the studio, Juliet’s most often on her bike getting lost whilst exploring the landscape of the South East.

Mike Webb, Senior Programme Manager – Natural Capital, West Midlands Combined Authority

Mike oversees the natural environment programme for the West Midlands Combined Authority. This is a highly urbanised area with nearly 3m people with a third of this population being in the top 10% of the UKs most deprived. Though green space and tree canopy cover can be abundant and healthy in some places not all is equal and most areas of green deprivation and climate vulnerability align with those with higher social and economic deprivation. The WMCA is looking at addressing these challenges in both the Local Nature Recovery Strategy and through our work on DEFRAs pioneering Local Investment in Natural Capital Programme (LINC).

Andrew van Doorn OBE HACT

Andrew is the Chief Executive of HACT. HACT partners with organisations across the housing sector to drive value for residents and communities through insight-led products and services which encourage innovation and foster collaboration. HACT helps them measure their social value, better understand the communities they serve, broker collaborations with the NHS, and connect with like-minded organisations.

Andrew has worked for HACT since 2003 and in housing, homelessness, supported housing, community development and wider social policy and practice for over 30 years. He is a Non- Executive Director at Hertfordshire Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust. Andrew was awarded an OBE in the King’s New Year Honours List 2023 for services to housing.

FACILITATOR BIOGRAPHIES

Ellen O'Hara, Director, Meaningfully Ltd

Ellen O'Hara is strategist, facilitator and programme designer with proven ability to enable enterprise, innovation and leadership capabilities. Over the past 25 years, she has worked with hundreds of creatives, social innovators and academics to design and grow sustainable businesses that make an impact. Ellen has designed and delivered national and international programmes for British Council, Nesta, Warwick Ventures, UAL, Clore Leadership, Innovate UK, Creative United and Crafts Council.

Currently, she leads the delivery of Frontline's Innovation Programme that equips social workers within local authorities to build and test innovative solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing children, young people and their families.

She is Co-Creator and Director of Modfin, providing business and financial modelling support to purpose led businesses, and Co-Founder of Wild Working, a startup platform for remote workers to connect with nature. She is also Co-Chair of Powered by Can, a social enterprise that works with children, young people and young adults to make them feel powerful, valued and connected, and Chair of Fifth Word who create and tour new plays by new writers. Ellen is based in Derbyshire and works internationally.

Pete Frost, Natural Resources Wales Urban Green Infrastructure Advisor , Cyfoeth Naturiol Cymru / Natural Resources Wales

Pete Frost has been working to make towns and cities better places for people and nature since 1993. He is currently Natural Resources Wales Urban Green Infrastructure Advisor and will shortly be moving on to run his own consultancy – Pete Frost Associates.

Having introduced the Accessible Natural Greenspace Standards to Wales Pete led the development of the toolkit used to assess those standards. He helps local authorities plan for accessible natural green space and encourages people and institutions to manage their gardens for the benefits of pollinators. Pete founded and supports the Wales Green Infrastructure Forum which disseminates best practice and connects green infrastructure professionals across the country.

A trained facilitator, Pete specialises in engaging local communities in planning for environmental change. His expertise is in the design and management of complex processes to resolve situations with a high potential for conflict.

Pete is a fellow of the UK Urban Ecology Forum, a fellow of the Institute of Welsh Affairs and deputy chair of the IUCN/WCPA Urban Conservation Strategies Specialist Group.

Elaine Cresswell, Director, reShaped

Elaine is a chartered landscape architect with 21 years experience delivering successful landscape schemes for housing, health and public sector clients. She is described by her peers as “a pragmatic and innovative designer who has a huge enthusiasm for landscape architecture” and applauded by her clients for her “customer focus ..and achievement of very difficult timescales”.

Over her career, Elaine has specialised in working with communities to design their own neighbourhoods. She recently won the national Landscape Institute Award for public engagement for her Big lottery funded project Bluegreen Liverpool. This was a year long audience development project engaging the public in improving the environment of Liverpool city centre and south docks.

Elaine is a member of the Landscape Institute’s Environmental Standards Committee, which gives her the unique opportunity to influence future national standards and guidance. In recent years, she has contributed to the development of BRE’s New Homes Standard, SuDS and Biodiversity British Standards and LI housing and health publications. She is currently working to drive up design standards as a member of the Building with Nature Board and Design Council, Places Matter! Cheshire West and Chester’s Design Review Panel.

From Blocks to Breakthroughs: Unlocking Pocket Parks for Climate Adaptation