Photo by Sivi Sivanesan.
“Mitti (मिट्टी) is the Panjabi word for soil. It can hold a deep spiritual and intergenerational dimension of Panjabi folk traditions and celebrations of fesitvals like Lohri and Vaisakhi.” – Geeta Ludhra, Dadima’s CIC
The Mitti Matters project used a range of creative methods to engage school groups, practitioners and community groups in co-producing a funding bid for research on wildflower-rich floodplain meadows. Beginning last summer, on the heels of my PhD in the sustainable management of floodplain meadows, I joined the Mitti Matters team as the project artist.
Communities were at the heart of this collaboration from the beginning, with the project being named by Geeta Ludhra of Dadima’s CIC. We began in late May 2024 with a field trip to BBOWT’s Meadow Farm – one of my research meadows – where we spent the day with the Dadima’s community. The rain held off until just after we left so we enjoyed some glorious sunshine as we explored the meadow and talked about all the things meadows can offer in terms of biodiversity, sustainable food production, soil health, flood mitigation and so much more. It felt like a real celebration of community, nature and connection.
Later in the autumn, whilst the meadows were quietly storing their magic beneath the soil, we held workshops with Geography students at Denbigh School. They learned about floodplain meadows and helped to prioritise the research topics that mattered most to them. They then carried out their own research for some brilliant Dragons Den style presentations. We were very impressed with their enthusiasm and fresh perspectives! We’ll be going back to share a field trip with them in the summer when local meadows are at their best.
We also worked with practitioners and community groups via both in person and online workshops to prioritise and further refine a final research proposal. Throughout all of these events I worked with the team to create visual summaries to capture ideas as they developed. These doodles served both to share potentially complex scientific concepts in an accessible way during the workshops, and to show participants how we have heard and incorporated their views. The final versions of these visual summaries are now a useful way to share the resulting proposal and how it emerged from our co-creation process, allowing participants an opportunity to help shape future research.
What’s next? The Floodplain Meadows Partnership will be collecting some pilot data as proof of concept for the proposal we arrived at. All of this will then inform a funding bid that is based on both science and community priorities.
Our community involvement won’t end there. Having built some good relationships with our partners, we hope to continue involving communities as citizen scientists to help build skills, share knowledge and foster good relationships, now and for the future. And of course we’ll be sharing more about what we learned through the Mitti Matters process and what comes out of it.
Acknowledgement
Mitti Matters is an Open University project, funded by UKRI/NERC through their Growing Shoots Programme.
Inklusive Nature CIC 