Building a vibrant workforce in our landscapes (Part 1)

Friday 19th November (15:30 - 17:00)

Highly skilled people are needed to enable a transition to regenerative and holistic farming approaches and deliver on national (and even international) priorities in the context of the multiple and interlinked biodiversity, climate and health crises. Access to knowledge, learning, training and employment are vital to ensure a just transition. In Cumbria, the need for training and employment is framed by the loss of Newton Rigg College, the need to support farmers to transition to new policy focused on public goods delivery, and the need to deliver on other policy priorities such as green recovery, net zero carbon and nature recovery.

We have been in a process of co-design since October 2020 and have begun scoping what’s needed to deliver land and nature based skills training and learning in Cumbria. This has led to a proposal for a Land and Nature Skills Service for Cumbria, which could act as a central hub of information, support increased delivery and act as an intermediary between policy priorities and capacity for delivery locally. This would support people wanting to join the sector and those already in it to access information, resources and contacts they need. We would like to map the current/developing initiatives and discuss what the opportunities, challenges and gaps are in the proposed Land and Nature Skills Service. This will help to widen the scoping process and what we need to consider for delivery.

Through this session we hope there will be shared insight and connections into what opportunities are available, contributions of what people know is already happening and identifying the key gaps we need to fill. Some questions we might ask for input on include:

• Are there agroecological skills initiatives you know about or are part of?
• Are there some peer-to-peer learning networks, more formal training delivery or apprenticeships, amongst many other mechanisms of sharing knowledge, that we should all know about?
• Are there projects you’re aware of which need more people working on the land?

This cocreation session links to our in-person session, where we will continue to build on the mapping and identify the gaps, challenges and opportunities which are emerging from our work together. The outputs will be made available to attendees and will feed into a wider scoping and delivery process, which we hope will enable more good work to happen across the sector.

Contributors:

Hannah Field, FFCC Cumbria Inquiry Coordinator
Julia Aglionby, FFCC Cumbria Inquiry Chair
Tania Lemmey, Centre for National Parks and Protected Areas (CNPPA) Development Officer