Lifelines connects people with land and supports diverse communities to create hedgerows and wildlife corridors that are a lifeline for nature.
With UK biodiversity plummeting and global carbon emissions still soaring, it's time to get our hands in the earth, and start planting! St Ethelburga’s corporate tree-planting and volunteering programme is designed for organisations looking to combine meaningful team experiences with measurable environmental and social impact. Through hands-on tree planting, Lifelines offers companies a powerful way to strengthen teams, meet CSR goals, and contribute to the regeneration of the UK’s natural landscape.
Lifelines corporate volunteering days are carefully designed to be meaningful, joyful, and professionally facilitated, making them ideal for:
*Team away days and retreats
*CSR and ESG programmes
*Leadership development experiences
*Employee engagement and wellbeing initiatives
Participants work alongside expert tree planters to plant diverse native species, while learning about biodiversity, land stewardship, and the role of hedgerows as lifelines for nature. Refreshments, catering and an optional farm tour are included.
If your organisation is interested in hosting a Lifelines corporate tree-planting day or exploring how the programme could support your goals, please reach out by filling in the form below.
Hedgerows are amazing. They unite and connect habitats. They provide homes and food to thousands of species of birds, mammals, and insects, and they create safe corridors for them to move through the country. They store carbon in their deep roots, improve soil quality, and reduce flood risk. They provide birdsong and blossom, and they transform our footpaths. They are a lifeline for the natural world, and for us too. With UK biodiversity plummeting and global carbon emissions still soaring, it's time to put our differences aside, get our hands in the earth, and start planting!
Our little family moved to Wales from England in 2022 with the dream of having our farm, four years later that dream was realised. Earths Farm CIC was born out of the need to bring people together through food, community, connecting to land and themselves. We also grow flowers and herbs for our skincare brand Earths Farm Skincare which in turn funds the large majority of the Farm. We host events where we plant trees together, teach people how to grow food and so much more. We've only been on our farm for a year and we know that the trees that we've planted with the help from St. Ethelbergas and the groups that they brought together, Wanderers of Colour and the Putney Community Garden, will add so much life and biodiversity to our farm. We're so thankful for everything that you've helped us to achieve, this will definitely go down in our memories as a time of true human connection and appreciation.
Determined to create a sanctuary for both people and wildlife, our family moved to Herefordshire and bought a 12 acre smallholding 6 years ago. So far we have restored the stream course, planted traditional orchards with heritage varieties, diversified the grasslands, created an organic fruit and vegetable garden, created a wildflower and herb garden, installed bird, bat and hedgehog boxes and created stone piles for reptiles. As a result, we’ve seen a phenomenal return of wildlife here; Red kites and Barn Owls nesting, huge Field Vole populations, many species of bees and butterflies foraging in the wildflower and herb gardens, hedgehogs, bats and numerous red and amber listed bird species. We are also focused on nurturing a sense of community; we run a nature club for local children and are in the process of building a roundhouse, outdoor kitchen and compost loo, so we can host nature connection events here and enable more people to reconnect to the sacred through the natural world.
Eddie is the current steward of Lopemede Farm in Thame, Oxfordshire and is a fourth-generation regenerative beef and sheep farmer, building natural capital for a better future and collaborating with businesses to get a better connection to nature. The farm is 5 years into an ambitious 30-year strategy of nature restoration and connection, and hedges are an important feature with over 32km of hedges present. In 2025, Eddie started a farm-based education CIC (Future Oaks) at the farm to cultivate peoples connection with food, farming and nature, and to empower children to make informed decisions that positively impact climate,
We are the third generation of farmers at Trucketts Hall Farm, based in the beautiful rolling countryside of Suffolk. We are on a journey to enhance a more diverse, sustainable and organic farm. For us, farming is about producing high quality healthy, sustainable food, whilst working with nature to preserve our environment and soil, through a system that is viable for generations to come. Working alongside Marianne’s parents on our family farm, we have introduced a herd of Hereford cattle to support the soil health and enhance the farms resilience. Alongside this we have sheep grazing, pigs and chickens.
The 370ha David Hodge Farms Partnership has been in the Hodge family since 1914. The farm uses increasingly more sustainable methods of food production. Using composted organic waste on farm to enhance soil organic matter, building soil health and fertility while reducing our carbon footprint. We have invested in environmental stewardship for 20+ years now. Establishing habitat both on individual sites and in connecting corridors alongside hedges and ditches helping both wildlife and protecting our natural assets. The current developing project is creating a wetland in a disused meadow and is astonishing how quickly the diversity has increased particularly plant and insect life. There have been 20 birds on the Amber list and 18 on the red list recorded on the farm so far. The Lifelines weekend was an incredibly uplifting experience, everyone's enthusiasm and interest in the wider farm was infectious.
Chettle is an 890 acre estate in North Dorset. We are like a beacon, surrounded by conventional arable mainly. Chettle’s land hasn’t always been considered by previous custodians and now, under Alice’s guardianship, it’s finally being considered in all decisions made on the estate. In the 8 years since Alice inherited the estate she has turned 1/3 of the farmland organic and by 2028, 1/2 of it will be. She is hoping to persuade the final farmer (with a 35 year tenancy) to also go organic. Watch this space! Chettle is home to 36 dwellings, a 10 bedroom holiday let, a woodland campsite, The Veg Lady (organic veg grower), a holistic healing centre, a community allotment and a very busy village shop. Its slogan is ‘honouring the past, whilst embracing the future’.
A year and a half ago I took 4.5 acres of depleted pasture via the Ecological Land Cooperative and have since been working very hard to turn this into a space teeming with life. Besides establishing a small no- dig market garden, which now supplies my local community with fresh, chemical free veg, I am dedicating areas to nature and encouraging biodiversity back to the land here. A living hedgerow here connecting my newly established woodland would be an extremely positive addition and I am very pleased that the process of doing so can be shared and enjoyed by groups of people for whom this will bring new skills and experiences. offgridorganics
The Baddaford Farm Collective consists of six independent enterprises; Vital Seeds, Incredible Vegetables, Green Ginger Organics, Red Earth Herbs, Pigment Plants Dyes and Baddaford Farm Partnership. The aim of the Baddaford Farm Collective is to make a small part of the world more like the world we want to live in and to promote beauty, sustainability and social justice within an economically viable farm. The Farm consists of 154 acres of a rolling Devon valley. Around 80 acres of the farm is managed by Guy, Milan and the team under Baddaford Farm Partnership, which specialises in growing organic perennial fruit and vegetable crops. These crops are almost entirely supplied to Riverford Organic Farmers and The Bull Organic Inn.
It is a rare and precious joy to be a part of this initiative, not only contributing to the restoration of biodiversity in our countryside, to get our hands into the soil, and experience the hospitality of farmers like Dave, but to bring together such diversity of participants in such a spirit of openness and generosity. It’s a little bit of magic, and I am so grateful for the opportunity.
Lifelines for me is like a beautiful intricate tapestry, where the warps are community building, solidarity amongst various groups, strengthening one's spiritual foundations; and the wefts are building resilience for the land, safeguarding biodiversity, mitigating soil health issues and positive climate actions. Just like different interactions of the warp and weft create different designs, these different designs are the unique experiences that every heart holds that got involved in this project. I chose to lead our team of volunteers from the Brahma Kumaris because I wanted to learn from my group’s rich experience of meditation and karmayoga, as well as learning from other groups to enrich my spiritual study. It helped me to learn more about myself and provided me with an opportunity to be a better friend to the Earth."
We did a Lifelines weekend together and it was lovely in unexpected ways. It was a way to explore and reconfigure our mother-daughter connection and it felt particularly profound to be doing this in the context of creation and creating that came with the hedgerow planting. We decided that we’d like to co-lead a group together, with the idea of offering other mothers and daughters that experience. Our womens’ weekend had a deep sense of shared connection and intimacy. We softly sang to our little saplings, a hedge-love song we had learned together, as we left them.
I had a rewarding and inspiring time on the Lifelines project with volunteers from my Sufi community. We seek closeness to God through silent meditation. We also look for ways we can get out to support the natural world. So Lifelines was a perfect fit for us. We worked with a group of students from King’s College London led by Sarah, the college chaplain. Halfway through our weekend, we had to abandon planting due to Storm Darrah. But the resilience and adaptability of the trees and birds in the aftermath of the storm inspired us. So, we resolved to return to complete the hedgerow a few weeks later. During the project we saw the beauty of creation and learnt a lot through observing nature at close hand. We saw parallels between our inner spiritual work at night and our outer work planting in the fields by day. Overcoming the obstacles we faced to complete our hedgerow brought our groups together and also drew us closer to our Creator.
Being a Lifelines Leader was an amazing opportunity. In between the planting, playing games and sharing our stories with each other, we could see that our groups were slowly starting to embody the hedgerows we were planting. Hedgerows start as these tiny shoots, rooted in the ground and slowly grow and start to connect with what has been planted around them until they create this interwoven tangle that provides shelter and safe homes for wildlife. We, as 20 individuals, strongly rooted in our different faith traditions and beliefs, were starting to become an intertwined community, creating a new safe space to share of ourselves. To see so many people taking the time to care for nature and one another was amazing – and resulted in us planting the roots of a new community through this shared experience.
Becoming a Lifelines Leader allowed me to both disconnect from city life and connect with nature, whilst also being able to share this opportunity with a group of people who I felt would benefit from the same experience. My volunteers were Iraqis of different backgrounds. From welcoming dawn with a stretch on frosty mornings to getting my hands in the soil and planting new hedgerow and trees, I found a new appreciation for things we often take for granted. Whilst meaningful and moving on an individual level, it was also a particularly poignant time to think about the connections to and care for land that we belong to or visit. I learnt a lot from the challenges of being a leader, and hope to have the opportunity to do it all over again.
Being a lifelines leader was indescribable. The amount of connection, peace and fulfilment that I gained from leading a weekend was much more than I could have expected and has stuck with me ever since. It would be such an honour to not only serve again, but to spread this joy and opportunity for respite and service.
Taking part in Lifelines has been a highlight of the year the last two years. It's such a privilege to build alliances with so many different communities and faith groups, each exploring and sharing our unique ways of being in service to life.