RHS is proud to support you and present these awards today Its Your Neighbourhood Awards

300,000 volunteers nationally You really make a Big difference! 10.9 million hours of your time!

185,000 trees are planted by IYN/IB groups each year!

Sustainable gardening and composting feature in most group activity

Sense of Community is the number 1 benefit according to our survey!

The RHS support for IYN groups: Quarterly Grass Roots magazine RHS advisory team for gardening advice relating to their groups Access to seed giveaways Downloadable advice in the online hub for groups: Access to great-value public liability insurance:

RHS Community Outreach advisors

RHS Greening Grey Britain Campaign – Britain needs plants! Gardens and green spaces can reduce flooding moderate extreme temperatures capture air pollution

Health and wellbeing Scientific evidence that Gardening eases stress Gardening encourages sustained cardiovascular exercise Reduced incidence of illness Increases self-esteem Provides opportunities for social interaction combatting loneliness

Supporting biodiversity in gardens and green spaces

Together we can make a difference – The potential scope Up to half of a town’s area is greenspace UK gardens contain almost 29 million trees (i.e. ~ 25% of all trees occurring outside woodlands) Our potential collective input Almost 90% of UK residents live in urban areas 22.7 million households (87% of homes) in the UK have access to a garden

Together we can make a huge difference! What we grow in our green spaces and how we manage them has a big impact!

You are the grassroots gardeners who can make a real change on the ground Please help to spread the word, ask your friends and family and local communities to get involved too and turn something grey to green You can pledge your support on the RHS website: and we’ll be theming next year’s Bloom and IYN launch around Greening Grey Britain too, so anything you do will be relevant for your group.

We hope that you will continue to develop and grow new and exciting projects over the coming years Thank you for standing up and making difference in your Neighbourhood