Our story
It all started when…
The story of how our charity came to be starts with a small number of individuals with a big dream of a green future.
Our first dreamer, Carole, has been thinking about the joy of green spaces ever since she was 9 years old growing up in Chadderton, Manchester. Chadderton was home to the largest cotton mill in the world and from her bedroom window she could see seventeen chimneys chucking plumes out into the sky.
This setting triggered an instinctive response in Carole - a desire to escape to green spaces. Now, living in leafy Warwickshire as opposed to Chadderton of old, she feels as though as she has died and gone to heaven.
Fast-forward to 2009, to a world where fossil fuel industries continue to expand, where the environment is in a dire state, where modern living means less and less time for going out in nature, and Carole is thinking of a career change.
She put pen to paper and created a ‘mind map’ whilst thinking out loud and imagining what she really wanted to be doing. What things do I like? What’s the dream? she asked herself.
The answer was obvious: doing something outdoors, creating green spaces and making the most of the environment.
To this end she embarked on a Green Entrepreneur Programme in 2011 called ‘Transformative Learning for Sustainable Living’. It is here that she encountered other dreamers and was particularly inspired by a group seeking to rewild desert areas in Tunisia. It was her experience during this 2 week course that had inspired her to take action and this was where her ideas of working on a green project were born.
In 2012, Carole met Felix Dennis at the Heart of England Forest and took up a post gathering corporate sponsorship for their causes. This ignited Carole’s love for the creation of green spaces, tree planting, caring for the environment and helping the local community.
In the year of 2014, Carole’s brother died of lung cancer from working in conditions with asbestos. Soon after, Carole was on a trip to the Forest of Dean with her brother’s children and grandchildren. Seeing the joy the children took from being in the forest struck her profoundly and it reminded her of the importance of nature on her and her family’s wellbeing and health.
What if there were more spaces like the Forest of Dean? With some of the money left to her by her brother, Carole bought five acres of grassland north of Stratford-upon-Avon with a mind to transform it into a thriving forest garden and with the aim of doing something impactful.
She then attended a forest gardening course in Devon run by Martin Crawford of the Agroforestry Research Trust.
Enter another dreamer, Hannah, recent environmental MSc graduate from Warwick Uni, whose interest in diverse food production systems that worked with nature, rather than against it, led her to the same forest gardening course as Carole. On a course attended by people who had travelled from all over the world, how fortunate it was that Hannah lived just outside of Stratford too. They got talking and soon began sharing plans and visions which lead to them becoming co-founders of the Forest of Hearts.
The charity was officially set up in 2015 and started working on local projects within Stratford-Upon-Avon with the first being ‘Harvest Share’ to pick apples at Ann Hathaway’s Cottage and distribute the fruit to the local community care homes.
With the success of this, the charity wanted to do more in the local community to encourage volunteering and give back and thus the Green Therapy group was born.
A few different local venues hosted the horticultural therapy group but as the size of the group began to grow, more space was needed and it was during a conference that Carole met Emma Bond from Stratford-Upon-Avon hospital and a partnership formed that saw Forest of Hearts create and maintain green spaces at the hospital.
Since then, the team has grown in size and thanks to funding and donations, many more projects could be created to have a positive impact on creating green spaces, helping people and places within the local community thrive, improving wellbeing and building biodiversity.
The charity’s board of local trustees meets regularly to discuss other projects including The Field of Life, NHS hospital gardens at Stratford, Leamington and Warwick, Warwickshire living walls, tree planting and many more community projects.