Allestree Park Community Rewilding Project : Evaluation of baseline community conversations 2023-24

Conversations with a variety of stakeholders were conducted during the consultation events, via walks and talks and the use of the online feedback form to hear their ideas and views about rewilding at Allestree Park in general, and on specific intervention suggestions. Additional emails from stakeholders were also collated and included in the dataset and are italicised. The questions steered conversations to the themes that people were still talking about and felt passionate about, and helped DWT gain greater clarification on people’s thoughts about proposals and ideas. From this listening project at baseline, a spreadsheet was developed to assess positive and negative feelings about the particular topics investigated which helped to reduce the risk of personal bias influencing intervention decisions.
In the original spreadsheet the names of the people submitting feedback forms were collated and showed that some people contributed their opinion multiple times. This highlighted that in some cases people’s opinions changed during the short consultation process, and that some wanted their thoughts repeatedly counted. The following summary has been conducted on data where these multiple submissions have been removed, though changes in opinions were captured, so represents the number of individual submissions.
Open comments and quotes from conversations (captured in notes by staff) and surveys were also collated, and this content has been summarised below. The topic areas posed by the questions asked, have been used as initial categories and open comments have driven additional categories/themes to highlight unprompted areas of importance to the stakeholders.
Prior to the consultation, people were aware of proposed ideas such as adding more grazing cattle with a boundary fence one active cycling group had been proposing a cycle track within the park, which had also prompted a rise in interest from the horse-riding community.
The following questions were asked within the consultation forms and in conversations:
1. Nature’s Recovery – how can Allestree Park be an even more amazing home to nature and help combat climate change?

2. Community Spaces – how can Allestree Park provide community growing orchards and other community enterprises?

3. A park for everyone – how can Allestree Park be even more welcoming to everyone?

4. Wild Wellbeing – spending time in nature is excellent for our health and wellbeing. Tell us how you would like Allestree Park to help with community wellbeing.

5. How would you like Allestree Park to support young people?

6. Any other comments?
Open text comments from the sample of surveys and conversations are categorised below, with additional categories summarised from ‘other comments, ideas and suggestions. The following themed analysis offers some insight into their ideas for, and responses to rewilding the park at Allestree.