Community

We believe local communities must be closely involved in nature recovery and are developing a progressive model for community empowerment in land management decision-making.

As we improve our existing approaches and help to embed community perspectives, knowledge and aspirations in our work, we have published an Engagement Roadmap (and welcome all feedback on this). This engagement approach will look different across the differing place-based communities who live in and around our project sites. For example, at Tayvallich, we have signed a landmark Memorandum of Understanding with the community body Tayvallich Initiative, implemented a rural housing burden, established a local management board, and have sold land back to the community at cost. Below are several ways in which Highlands Rewilding is working to support local community development and prosperity across our projects.

Community Engagement websites and surveys launched!

We have recently launched three new Community Engagement websites, where you can find out more about our work at Bunloit, Beldorney and Tayvallich, and get involved in events, volunteering and other projects.

As we shape our plans for local engagement, we want to hear local perspectives and priorities for the land we manage both in the longer term and through specific projects currently underway. One such project is the Community Joint Ventures FIRNS funded programme, which seeks to develop collaborative enterprises with local communities that benefit from and/or contribute to nature restoration. Through this survey, we want to hear local ideas for ventures and test those that have already been suggested, as well as build a deeper understanding of what people particularly value about the land and landscape at our sites. We are grateful for your time in filling this in and helping to circulate it to ensure we gain a wide range of views.

You can find the surveys here:
Have Your Say Today - Highlands Rewilding Bunloit Community - Commonplace
Have Your Say Today - Highlands Rewilding Beldorney Community - Commonplace
Have Your Say Today - Highlands Rewilding Tayvallich Community – - Commonplace

Please only fill in the survey for the site you live or work close to.

Community Engagement websites and surveys launched

We have recently launched three new Community Engagement websites, where you can find out more about our work at Bunloit, Beldorney and Tayvallich, and get involved in events, volunteering and other projects.

As we shape our plans for local engagement, we want to hear local perspectives and priorities for the land we manage both in the longer term and through specific projects currently underway. One such project is the Community Joint Ventures FIRNS funded programme, which seeks to develop collaborative enterprises with local communities that benefit from and/or contribute to nature restoration. Through this survey, we want to hear local ideas for ventures and test those that have already been suggested, as well as build a deeper understanding of what people particularly value about the land and landscape at our sites. We are grateful for your time in filling this in and helping to circulate it to ensure we gain a wide range of views.

You can find the surveys here:

Please only fill in the survey for the site you live or work close to.

Local jobs and education

Alongside our in-house team of 23 and growing, many of whom live on or close to our estates, we have provided paid summer internships for local university students, one of whom has stayed on with us and is now Executive Assistant to the CEO.

Our first apprentice joined the team from the local high school in 2022, part funded by the Scottish government. They were involved in the project on regular work experience from school before joining us full time after leaving school. They now work full time within the ranger team, gaining experience in a wide range of rural skills, habitat management, and restoration work. These are the first of a planned stream of apprenticeships and local hirings as we scale-up our nature recovery work.

Glen Urquhart High School has teamed up with our local rangers to lead environment science classes. A series of two outdoor education classes are also ongoing, helping young people understand the environmental crisis, learn bushcraft skills, and enjoy working outdoors as part of a team. The children have taken part in peat depth surveys, camera trapping, fungi surveys, planting of a forest garden, which they'll be adding to this year, and building bird boxes from timber milled on the estate.

We are also working with The University of the Highlands & Islands, which has been carrying out research at Bunloit on the peatlands and the red squirrel population. A student from the Scottish School of Forestry in Inverness joined us for a work placement as part of their course. We also welcomed the Highland Biological Recorders Group to the estate, which specialises in the identification of a wide range of species.

Conversations, collaboration and consultation

We have been conferring with local communities at Bunloit, Beldorney and Tayvallich throughout, and are continually trying to improve our engagement programme. We use a wide range of approaches, from individual and group meetings to special events, online fora and attendance at community events. Recently, we have been developing formal ways of increasing community agency in partnership with community bodies, for example through the establishment of a local Estate Management Board for Tayvallich, with devolved operational powers. We are also co-developing ways of measuring ‘community baselines’ to monitor how well we achieve community objectives through land management.

We have also introduced a Community Engagement Coordinator position to lead on further developing our engagement process. This is part of a recently launched project, ‘Joint Ventures for Scalable Community Benefits from Rewilding’ under the Facility for Investment Ready Nature in Scotland (FIRNS) scheme, co-funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund in partnership with the Scottish Government and NatureScot. The joint ventures will capitalise on environmental improvements from rewilding and the valuable ecosystem services they generate. They will be a mechanism for involving more people in nature restoration, boosting the economy, skills development, job creation and cohesion in the communities local to the estates owned by Highlands Rewilding.

We encourage interest from neighbouring landowners for landscape restoration, such as with the expansion of the Forest of Hope. We believe that collaboration across landscape scales not only dramatically increases the effectiveness of nature restoration, but also the scope for community empowerment and benefits.

Community ownership

In early 2023 we ran a share issue to expand the ownership of Highlands Rewilding, with a minimum investment to £50. The crowdfund raised almost £1.2 million, over 750 people invested and now co-own Highland Rewilding, with over 40% being Scottish residents.

We believe local communities have to be closely involved in nature recovery, so are proud to have attracted investment from so many Scots, and in particular Highland Scots. Through citizen rewilding, we aim to increase our impact as an accelerator of nature-based solutions, help tackle the rising inequalities of land ownership in Scotland, and contribute to the repopulation of the Highlands, while making an ethical return on investment.

We have sold, at cost, land to the community at Tayvallich through the community body Tayvallich Initiative, whose aspirations for “reversing depopulation and maintaining and developing employment in the area […] while also maintaining the area’s natural richness and responding and adapting to the climate and biodiversity emergencies” (see Tayvallich Initiative’s website), align well with our own.

The existential threats of climate meltdown and biodiversity collapse cannot be overcome without the full engagement of local communities.

Resilience to climate change

We believe rewilding can help communities become more resilient to the effects of climate change, biodiversity collapse and rural depopulation.

Rewilding land pulls carbon out of the air and stores it in trees, peat and other habitats
Rewilding can prevent flooding and wildfires, protecting local communities.
Rewilding helps wildlife adapt to climate change and has the potential to save species from climate-driven decline or extinction

Rewilding offers multiple climate-related benefits to local communities to help them thrive. From more diverse, wilder landscapes which are less prone to fires and floods through to diverse nature-based economies which support local sustainable jobs, including within regenerative agriculture.