Shortlisted for a 2025 Churchill Fellowship: Growing Joy Through Stewardship

I’m excited to share that I’ve been shortlisted for a 2025 Churchill Fellowship — a global research award supporting bold ideas with the potential to create lasting change in the UK and beyond.

My proposal explores how child-led street based environmental stewardship might reshape the way we design, maintain, and fund public spaces. It’s about reconnecting children with nature, reframing joy, play and care as essential infrastructure for resilient, thriving communities.

Through InvestiNatures, I’ve begun developing a model that bridges areas too often kept apart: street based green infrastructure, education, community care, and public realm maintenance. I’m particularly interested in how symbolic and measurable acts of stewardship — including play, planting, storytelling or even tokens — might support new forms of longer term care, investment and responsibility.

If successful, I’ll travel to Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, the US, and Canada to learn from cities already empowering children to shape and steward their environments. But whatever the outcome, this work will grow. The need is real, and the opportunity is urgent.

As interview day on the 14th May draws nearer, I can feel something building — a growing current of excitement, pressure, and hope. There’s a lot riding on this, yet I’m trying to stay rooted in what this project is really about: joy, care, and stewardship. This isn’t just a pitch — it’s the continuation of a story already unfolding. So I’m holding the nerves, riding the momentum, and rooting for success — not just for myself, but for the children and places this work is meant to serve.

Thank you to the Churchill Fellowship team for recognising the potential of this vision. If you’re working at the intersection of nature, childhood, social value or civic design, I’d love to connect.

Let’s grow something joyful, together!