Voluntary Action North East Lincolnshire (VANEL) in partnership with The Culture House, Franklin College, Hammond House and the University of Hull will deliver their Climate Action Fund project across North East Lincolnshire. Our Future Starts Here is a bold, transformational public engagement programme that educates and inspires behaviour change and motivates more people to take positive action in North East Lincolnshire and beyond. The Culture House will use immersive participation in visionary, creative and community based activities to increase environmental awareness, create sustainable community action and grow local opportunities for green skills development.
The overall project will focus its climate change impact awareness raising campaign on young people and families living in disadvantaged communities. The partners intend to build on VANEL’s existing Green Influencers’ work to empower more young people to take the lead in influencing their families, peers, friends and neighbours to take positive action to improve the environment where they live.
Expected outcomes include: all participants gaining a clearer understanding of climate change impacts; the effects on local biodiversity; how human behaviour has, and can impact on climate; why it is necessary to act now and what steps can be taken to reduce carbon footprint. North-East Lincolnshire residents will be motivated to take action, strengthen social cohesion and offer a sense of purpose to others through taking collective community action resulting in a mass change in approach to environmental matters.
Our project is part of a UK-wide national lottery funded programme, which will share lessons and experiences with other Climate Action Funded projects over the next five years. Franklin College will promote our green partnership work at is annual student conference and Hammond House will produce documentary coverage of the conference to share our collective vision and progress towards achieving it.
The University of Hull will be undertaking research and complete the overall project monitoring, evaluation and bi-annual reports as we move forward through the delivery programme.
The main Our Future Starts Here website is:
Read the full launch article from January 2026 here.
Partners
Voluntary Action North East Lincolnshire (VANEL)
The Culture House
Hammond House
Franklin Sixth Form College
The University of Hull
Funders
Climate Action Fund from The National Lottery Community Fund
CreateNEL match funding
As part of Our Future Starts Here creative programme funding from CreateNEL which enabled us to deliver large public art mural consultation and design sessions in the West Marsh of Grimsby.
We were delighted to receive this support to enable us to engage residents in planning and design sessions including our green influencers group at Littlecoates Primary Academy as part of their weekly arts in nature sessions.
