Sustainability Stories – “How we set up our village climate action group”
Eco SoCo – environmental community action group in Sonning Common.
Eco Soco began life as a FaceBook group before COVID but then moved from a virtual group to an in-person one in early 2024 when one of the organisers, Julie Shorter, felt she needed to do something positive for climate change in the village.
While volunteering with a group called the Compassionate Loaf, baking bread to sell and raise money for charity, she visited Abbeycrest nursing home. There she met the home’s area manager, who told her he wanted to get the home more involved in the community and asked if she had any ideas.
“I spontaneously told him I was going to start a community environmental group for the village and what we needed was a place to meet. He replied that we could meet at a room at the nursing home. He asked what our plans were. I suggested a community orchard and he just offered some land there and then. I thanked him and left. I remember sitting in my car afterwards and I started trembling. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been thinking about it for so long and now it was going to happen.”
Back on Facebook Julie posted that there’d be a meeting for a new environmental group for Sonning Common. Eight people attended and together the set themselves an ambitious list of projects, including creating a website to promote events to villagers.
The first achievement was a ‘hedgehog highway’. Following a talk from an expert dozens of residents made holes, gaps and tunnels between their gardens to create a network of highways across the village, enabling hedgehogs to forage for food, find mates, and seek shelter. The growing network of highways can be seen on a digital map .
Eco SoCo began running monthly repair cafés in summer 2024 and now has around 13 regular repair volunteers covering electronics, jewellery, bikes and clothes.
With the help of people across the village the group has planted 5,000 native bulbs on land and verges. It has worked with Oxfordshire County Council ‘s Tree Service, and SOHA Housing, as well as Abbeycrest and has just had planted five community orchards plus twenty-five additional trees in the village. In May 2025 South Oxfordshire District Council awarded Eco SoCo an Everyone Active Grant towards caring for these community orchards and creating pollinator plant zones.
The group also has a community veg garden and a seed library. It hosts films and talks with climate and nature themes and takes part in the annual garden tree giveaway in Oxfordshire.
As the group continues to build, Julie added, “There are so many people – individuals – who want to help and huge numbers of businesses and organisations who have funds or land and want to support projects like ours. The hardest part is making sure those organisations and volunteers find each other. Once they do then people really can make these amazing things happen.”
Contact us - Climate and Biodiversity Team
South Oxfordshire District Council
Abbey House
Abbey Close
Abingdon
OX14 3JE
