Get Out More staff have been having a wild time this June, by taking up the 30 Days Wild challenge.  The initiative from the Wildlife Trust aims to get people connecting with nature by introducing more ‘random acts of wildness’ into their lives.  From a few seconds or minutes to a few hours, the challenge aims to get businesses, schools and individuals noticing, and therefore caring for the environment around them.

As you can imagine, running outdoor projects on a daily basis, we have plenty of opportunities to get close to nature, but we  tried to create more opportunities in our ‘indoor’ work lives too such as cycling to work, holding meetings outdoors and even just bringing wild flowers into the office.  The challenge helped staff to unwind after work too.  “Sometimes I would get home tired after a busy day, with no inspiration for what new activity I could do that day.” said Annie Berrington, Get Out More’s Managing Director, “but taking myself outside I would notice  the swallows catching flies at dusk, or the number of bats swooping over the garden after the sun went down.  Now my daughter plans to make some bat boxes for them”

The hot weather and long days certainly helped the everyone get outdoors.  Julia enjoyed several dips in the river Wharfe while Sam took his young daughter out in a canoe.  Annie fulfilled an ambition to walk from home (Keighley) to the hill on the horizon, Great Whernside in the Dales, a walk of 34 miles that took 2 days and a wild camp in the woods.  From sun rise on 1 June to sunset  on 30 June, we tweeted each day – you can see our daily tweets on our Twitter page 

The 30 day challenge is now finished, but hopefully has instilled some habits for bringing nature in to our everyday lives, that we can sustain through the summer and into the cooler months of the year.