Environmental volunteering

Australian academic Matt Ebden researches the benefits of contact with nature, and ways to support people to be involved in activities around natural environments. In this interview with HPHP Central he discusses the importance of increasing people’s involvement with nature and their communities.

Listen to the interview here:

Interview transcript:

HPHP: Welcome to Healthy Parks Healthy People Central. We spoke to Australian academic Matt Ebden:

Matt Ebden: My name’s Matt Ebden, and I am a coordinator of the Health Sciences degree at Deakin University, and I’m currently based at the Warrnambool campus, which is about three hours south-west of Melbourne on the coast.

HPHP: Ebden explained his work at the nexus of parks, the natural environment and community healthy.

ME: Part of my role as a university lecturer is to do research. So I’ve been researching the benefits of contact with nature, and ways that we can support people to be involved in activities around natural environments.

HPHP: Speaking to Ebden in Melbourne, I asked him to tell us about the key benefits of increasing people’s involvement with their communities, and their environment.

ME: Well, there are benefits for people who do engage; there’s also benefits for the community by people participating, and also for the environment too. So if we look at those three levels…

For individuals — people have the opportunity to connect with other people, so they’re opportunities to make friends, but also other social opportunities as well: so learning from each other, learning to be a part of a team, working together. And they’re things that are really integral to us as humans. We’re social beings, and so being involved with activities such as environmental volunteering, for example, where people are working together, has all those benefits socially.

For the community, when people are working on various projects, they’re contributing to the community in a positive way. So in the case of environmental volunteering, they’re improving their natural environment — surrounding where people live — and that provides better access for people in communities to have improved environments to enjoy, which is really important for community health.

With the projects that we’ve been working on, essentially we’ve been looking at bringing various organisations together to support people to become involved in environmental volunteering. And that’s had an enormous community benefit when organisations start to share resources and work together.

So the primary organisations that we’ve had working together are Health and Community Services, with environmental agencies, educational institutions, and local government. So for example, the Health and Community Services benefit because there are opportunities for their clients or the people they work with, to become involved with activities that are good for their health and wellbeing. Environmental agencies benefit because it means that there’s more hands on deck — more people to do the work that needs to be done — from a volunteering perspective, so that’s really good for them as well. And I guess by sharing resources there’s more capacity to get work done as well, with the community.

And it creates a more cohesive community as well, and people are working together and doing things positive. And then of course there are the environmental benefits when people are working in the natural environment including weeding, tree planting, picking up rubbish: all the things that people do to improve their natural environment benefits biodiversity, and let’s face it — we’re at a time now when humans are having quite an impact on the planet, not always in a positive way, and we need to find ways of supporting biodiversity and having a positive impact.

But just getting back to some of the individual benefits. There are quite range of benefits, not just socially but we’ve also been looking at some of the mental health benefits of being involved. So for example when people are connecting with each other, and with the environment, they often feel a positive sense of that connection that seems to be really important as well. People who are, for example, who experience depression, report feeling very positive as a result of being involved, so there’s something in it for them. And everyone’s different in terms of what they may experience, but there’s some commonality that people do gain that overall benefit emotionally.

For some of these people that haven’t had a job for example, they may not have been involved in the community in a great way. It’s the first time that they’ve really felt they’ve been able to put something into the community, and they feel a sense of … their self esteem grows, they feel empowered by being involved, once some of those challenges around being included break down for them and they feel more comfortable, they’re more likely to be involved in other activities.

HPHP: Of course, working with people affected by mental illness can present its own challenges. Introducing individuals with depression or anxiety into new environments, often populated by strangers, can be quite daunting. Ebden talks about the kind of support required to make these programmes work effectively.

ME: What we’re doing in South West Victoria is we’ve employed… well, there is someone who is involved in supporting that process. So she acts as a conduit between the environmental sector and the health and community cervices sector, to support that involvement. So she’s encouraging workers from mental health services to engage in the process, bring clients along, or encourage clients to attend. And she’s also working with the environmental sector to ensure that there are opportunities available for social inclusion.

The research is finding that we do need to have support available to people. The challenge for health and community services is that often health workers aren’t funded, so often health professionals aren’t necessarily funded to do that kind of work. So essentially we either need to create positions and have those positions funded, or find avenues to support funding, for people to support people to support people to become included. That’s one of the solutions, and the other solution is to build up the current health workforce and build up their knowledge and experience, so that they feel that they’re able to engage in those activities in terms of social inclusion — that they feel supported to do so by their managers. And that means that we need a funding shift in terms of our policy directions.

For example, we have mental health policy both national and Victorian policy that’s very much about social inclusion and looking at promoting health and preventing further illness through social inclusion. However, the funding doesn’t seem to be following at the moment. So even though we’ve got policy directions that say “well, you need to be doing this”, the funding isn’t necessarily there.

So the research that I’ve been doing is really challenging some of those notions, and challenging health and community services to get out there, and to start to partner with other organizations in the community to foster that kind of social inclusion process.

HPHP: In a wider community sense, you’ve been working with some of the communities affected for example by drought in the South Coast region?

ME: That’s right.

HPHP: Could you tell us a little bit more about the kind of… the capacity for environmental volunteering to help communities recover from tragedy or from times of hardship?

ME: Well it’s quite pertinent at this point in time with some natural disasters that we’re experiencing in Australia, and overseas as well. It seems that… well, the research is showing that when people are involved in environmental work, essentially it could be any community work after a disaster or other incident, it really gives people a sense of … well, when they’re involved in the recovery process, they’re recovering as well. So people appear to need to be central to that process, and it’s part of their healing. So essentially if there’s been an environmental disaster, for people to be able to come in and do some work to support the process, it is a mutual benefit there for them as well.

And it’s about bringing people together, and supporting each other — that seems to be central to it — but also about seeing changes in their environment. So for example with drought, people are seeing changes to the landscape. We can protect the landscape by planting species there that can tolerate drought and what not, and that has benefits for the land. And people feel like they’re doing something positive in that way. So in terms of drought recovery, there are things that the people can do in a positive way.

A bushfire is a similar situation, so being able to revegetate and support the processes after bushfire to rebuild and to get together and to support each other to do that seems to be important. And people having a say in the recovery process, not necessarily a top-down approach — where government’s directing everything, isn’t what people need. It seems from people’s recovery process they actually need to have some say in what’s going on, and to direct where to go. So governments need to provide resources to enable things to happen, but a lot of the decision making needs to involve the people so people from those communities actually getting in there, making some decisions and doing some of the on-the-ground work.

There’s a hypothesis called the biophilia hypothesis, and people may want to explore that, and E.A. Wilson was one of the founders of that philosophy. He explains that we have evolved with nature, and thus health and wellbeing is dependent on nature, so that if we remove ourselves from the natural environment — which highly urbanized environments tend to do — then we can suffer from nature deprivation. And that is a real health threat to us, so to find ways that we can really include nature in our urban environments is paramount.

We did some work with people from the Corio and Norlane area in Geelong. People who were often not as well connected with others and with the natural environment: there weren’t too many opportunities for them to become involved locally in nature-based settings. So we bussed them out to Anglesea and Airey’s Inlet as part of the Feel Blue Touch Green project. And these were people who experienced depression, anxiety and social isolation. We provided those opportunities, and some of the changes that people went through were phenomenal.

They really opened up in terms of their social aspect — they were willing to talk and become involved with things — and they developed a real appreciation for the natural environment as well. So they developed pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours and that demonstrated to me that they’d really made a connection to the environment: that there was something there that they had been missing. One of the guys said that he used to just throw rubbish anywhere — he didn’t really care about the environment — and it wasn’t until he became involved with Feel Blue Touch Green that he, through the environmental restoration works and what not, tree planting and weeding activities, he developed an appreciation and a connection with the natural environment. And thus he was wanting to put back into it and to care for it, so he said he no longer threw garbage anywhere. That was a really positive outcome.

When we can show people that there’s something in it for them, some positive experience, they’re more likely to want to give back and to protect it. I think that’s definitely what we need to do. And for people in urban settings, for them to have contact with the natural environment which they reported to be quite healing, they then developed an appreciation for it as well.

HPHP: On the subject of environmental volunteering, Ebden talks about important factors for progress, including more resources, a greater commitment to funding collaboration between health and environment sectors, and giving volunteers more of a say in the projects they work on.

He talks about some of the ways in which communities can improve their support for environmental volunteers, and the benefits their programmes return to the community.

ME: Well, in terms of the research that I’ve been doing, I’ve been focused on diversity and on supporting people from various backgrounds to become included. At the moment, traditional volunteers are generally people over the age of 50, who are from fairly well-off backgrounds, and we need to challenge some of those notions because the benefits of volunteering are quite paramount.

People live longer lives, they live more satisfying lives, so if we can provide opportunities for everyone to be included, then that’s important. And that means breaking down stigmas — stigmas associated with, from a socio-economic context, from a mental health or mental illness context, disabilities, people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, and really breaking down some of the stigma around that, and looking at how we can support agencies to accept people from backgrounds, various ages and what not.

Some of the volunteer groups can be quite cliquey, which is what some of the research is finding, and to try and provide an avenue for people to come in and become included can be challenging. So we’re looking at ways that we can support environmental groups to become more inclusive. And one of those is through education.

There’s a training called Mental Health First Aid training which is designed for people in the community that don’t have a mental health training background. It provides opportunities for them to learn what it’s like to have a mental illness, some of the benefits of supporting people with mental illness, breaking down some of the stigma around mental illness. And then that creates a more supportive environment when people do come on board — we’ve found that it’s quite successful.

Generally in terms of the actual inclusion process with people with mental illness, for example, we never once had any incidents. There was never anything in terms of when a mental illness actually showed up and interfered with a group’s ability to move forward. In fact, we found it quite the opposite. We found that people contributed really valuably, and they were in — and I’ll use the word — “normal” kinds of settings, they behaved in a very normal kind of fashion. Nevertheless, it is important for us as a community to accept people for who they are to some degree, as long as people aren’t causing harm to other people, themselves or their environment. We generally… we just need to be a little more inclusive. And it’s about supporting groups to be accepting in that way.

Certainly I’ve found that in working with environmental groups, they have been incredibly accepting, and supportive.

HPHP: In terms of the future direction of his research, Ebden believes that much of it will involve formulating and advocating for better models of collaboration, which make environmental volunteering attractive to governments and health agencies.

ME: It has implications for health and community services, so we need to ensure that the health dollar and health policy is directed more around social inclusion, and recognising the importance of the natural environment in terms of health and wellbeing.

So recognising nature deficit disorder, for example. So if people are experiencing various health issues, the root of those issues could possibly be based on not having enough contact with the natural environment. So raising that awareness, researching that further in terms of the importance of nature, and ensuring that our community and our health system supports nature-based activities for example, and people being involved with natural environments.

From the social inclusion point of view, equally, we don’t necessarily do enough to … our focus is very much on that real acute treatment, and we still probably don’t do enough to really support people once they get out of hospital and into the community. How do we keep people healthy? That’s where our health dollar really needs to be directed. How can we prevent people from developing illness such as mental illness, and if they do, how can we best support them so the mental illness doesn’t develop further?

That’s where we need to create preventative and health promotion strategies. Social inclusion is certainly one of those, supporting people to become involved in work and environmental volunteering activities, sport and rec activities, and what not. This research has implications for really challenging some of those notions and looking where funding can go.

Supporting environmental organisations as well, by giving them a model that says “well, here’s a way that you can increase the capacity of what you’re doing, by including people who aren’t doing a lot with their time at the moment that’s meaningful to them,” so as environmental agencies it’s about learning how to be accepting and learning to work with diversity and what not.

So they’re a couple of implications, I guess. Challenging policy, challenging where funding goes, and ensuring that agencies are being quite inclusive as well.

HPHP: On the note there of policy, funding and agencies, they’re kind of all in the government, NGO, not-for-profit realm. Are there any plans to engage private companies such as health insurance companies, in similar programmes of inclusion or incentivisation of greater involvement with natural environments?

ME: Yeah, well, there’s some great scope and opportunities there. So to involve any agencies that are interested in supporting the health of the community, to understand some of the connections between nature, social inclusion and health, and certainly health insurers — if they’re putting their money where their mouth is, so to speak — once they understand some of the benefits of this they hopefully would come on board and support processes like this.

HPHP: Finally, Ebden recounts one example of the positive effect environmental volunteering can have on mental, physical and social health.

ME: When I was in Glasgow in Scotland, we were working with a group from Motherwell —which is a fairly deprived or socially-disadvantaged area of Glasgow in Scotland. There was a couple who were also in their fifties who experienced depression, and they weren’t at all involved in their community. They said they sat home every day and watched television and ate chips, getting very overweight, not very physically healthy or mentally healthy.

They were attracted to come down to an environmental volunteering afternoon that was put on by the local environmental group. They were attracted by the free food that was on offer, so they came down and they actually got involved as well with some of the planting and activities that were going on that day, and they kept coming back on a regular basis.

And I think this was probably about a year after they started when I was interviewing them and talking to them about their experience. I said to them: “What would have happened to you if you didn’t become involved?” and they both said, “We would have been dead.” So essentially they were… they used the words “couch potatoes” — eating potatoes — and they were living a very unhealthy and miserable life. And this just gave them life.

Being involved with that environmental volunteering group just provided a really powerful opportunity for them. So it was life-giving and the whole sense of them healing themselves as well as healing the environment, and being involved in those social opportunities which are so powerful — and they were fairly common stories that we found with people who were being involved with environmental volunteering. So a whole range of mental health and physical health benefits, as well as social health benefits, too.

HPHP: That was Matthew Ebden from Deakin University’s School of Health and Social Development, speaking to Healthy Parks Healthy People Central.

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