Project Category
All Projects
Healthy Planet, Healthy People: Change Award 2026
Willow Worlds 2: Cut and Plant
In Spring 2024, funded by a Catalyst Award, the Willow Worlds project was established in a public park in Fife, growing willow branches to protect young trees from deer. The project aimed to assess whether living structures could offer a natural, attractive alternative to plastic tree guards.
Change Award – Healthy Environment
Scraps to suppers: Closing the islands food loop
Supported by a Change Award, the Scraps to Suppers project aims to explore how small island communities can create an affordable and sustainable food growing system by reducing waste and reliance on imported goods, and by closing the local resource loop.
Change Award – Healthy Environment
Annlan: Flax heritage and sustaining the new textile commons
Annlan—meaning sustenance—is a research project that blends oral tradition with contemporary technology to explore how flax could strengthen a local circular economy rooted in the commons.
Change Award – Healthy Communities
Cupar Food Station - Community Masterplan
Last year, with the support of the Catalyst Award, the Cupar Development Trust developed an outline business case for Cupar Foodstation, a food-themed enterprise and welfare hub in Cupar, offering a community-led solution and a people-centred approach delivered through local organisations and food producers.
Change Award – Healthy Foods
Healthy Planet, Healthy People: Catalyst Award 2026
Protecting crops and soils using waste
Vermicompost—a nutrient-rich product of the decomposition process that uses worms to aid and accelerate composting to create a mixture of decomposed food waste and worm castings—has been shown to outperform traditional compost and reverse soil damage from synthetic fertilisers.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Northmavine community composting project
The Northmavine Community Development Company (NCDC) will use their Catalyst Award to launch a new community composting scheme as part of its “Growing Local” programme to boost food resilience, reduce waste, and support sustainable living in rural Shetland.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
How Green is Too Green?
Established in 2020, Fixing for a Future is a community that looks to increase an understanding of climate change in its local community. They have established a tool library, and they host skills-sharing workshops and repair cafes at schools and libraries across East Lothian.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
The Bathgate Repair Cafe: A community sustainability study
The Bathgate Repair Cafe is a 6-month, community-led pilot project designed to research and deliver a practical solution to household waste and the cost-of-living crisis. The awarded group will establish a monthly repair hub at their community market, where a skilled fixer and volunteers will repair broken items for free, diverting them from landfill.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Finding, and overcoming, the barriers to choosing to eat locally grown vegetables in Blairgowrie & Rattray
The Blairgowrie & Rattray Development Trust’s project aims to understand what prevents local residents from choosing to eat locally grown vegetables, despite several community initiatives—such as the BaRI Store, a volunteer-run shop stocking surplus food from supermarkets to help reduce food waste and to increase the use of refill—promoting local, healthy food.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Kirrie Community Farm - Meadowland
For decades the intensification of farming has contributed to severe biodiversity loss in Scotland. This, coupled with increasing climate instability is making it more difficult to grow food in this country.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Conifers aren't just for Christmas!
Conifers make up 30-35% of our world’s forests; however, despite originating in the late Palaeozoic period and surviving major mass extinctions, they often dominate recovery ecosystems, yet 34% of the species are under threat today.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Aberfoyle Coppice Creatures
Coppicing is a traditional woodland management technique that was popular before the First World War but has been underused in Scotland since. Coppiced trees are cut at their base to encourage stronger, straighter regrowth, allowing more light to reach the forest floor and potentially increasing biodiversity by supporting a wider range of plant and animal life.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Lady Lane Community Garden
The Lady Lane Community Garden group in Paisley has been awarded to develop a temporary, modular micro-greenspace, designed to assess and refine ideas that will inform the future permanent regeneration of the Argyle Street/Lady Lane site.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Communities
Community Champignons: Embedding Sustainability in Peer-led Community Projects
Community Champignons is a men’s wellbeing initiative centred on supporting participants—many from disadvantaged or isolated backgrounds—to develop skills and confidence through oyster mushroom cultivation.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Communities
Becoming Wild: Transhumance to support wellbeing of people, animals and nature.
This awarded pilot project will explore the concept that the well-being of people, animals and the land is interconnected. The researchers will employ small-scale community transhumance—a traditional practice of moving with animals through seasonal grazing areas—to determine whether the custom can support wellbeing across all three.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Communities
Green Spaces for Everyone - Youth-Led Research into Intersectional Access to Green Spaces
Through the awarded Green Spaces for Everyone project, the Scottish Youth Parliament will co-ordinate youth-led research into young people of colour’s safe access to and meaningful participation in the design and development of green spaces locally and nationally.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Communities
Citizen led research on potential impacts at Loch Ken, with implications for the wider catchment
Residents of New Galloway have longstanding concerns about pollution in the town’s main freshwaters, particularly from sewage effluent and other inputs. This was identified as the top issue in a recent Community Council survey, which will inform the forthcoming Local Place Plan.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Communities
UnBEANlievably tasty
Taking place at two market gardens—Upper Ballaird Farm Co-op, Stirlingshire and Lauriston Farm, Edinburgh—the UnBEANlievably Tasty project aims to investigate which bean varieties can perform well in market garden conditions whilst also providing tasty, nutritious legumes for local consumers.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Foods
Seeds of change
The Seeds of Change project will support the development of the Scottish Seed Hub; a co-operative of growers aiming to increase the production and dissemination of locally-adapted, open-pollinated seeds grown using optimal agroecological practices.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Foods
Fermenting community
Through the Fermenting community project, Ieva Chaleckyte, a fermentation revivalist will work with the Mandala Garden Project in Nairn to utilise overabundant seasonal fruit and vegetables to increase fermented food consumption and build a strong community network through the group production of fermented food.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Foods
Community-Led Insights into Gardening, Cooking, and Pantry Participation at the Royston Food Hub and Their Effects on Wellbeing
Royston, North Glasgow, is considered a food desert, where residents face economic disadvantage, limited access to fresh produce, and social isolation.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Foods
Can rock dust improve soil and crops?
UK food self-sufficiency has declined to 62%, with a heavy reliance on imported food from regions that can be vulnerable to drought, fire and flood. Scottish Islands, once able to survive for weeks without a boat, are today at the end of the distribution line and need to rebuild food security.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Foods
Seed Circle Lochaber
Seed Circle Lochaber is a community-led research project that explores how a locally organised seed-saving network can strengthen food resilience, food cultures, biodiversity, and community wellbeing in Lochaber. It will involve food growers of every scale, from people who grow herbs and vegetables on a windowsill to crofters, small producers, and community food-growing projects.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Foods
Our Food, Our Health, Our Future
Access to healthy, affordable, and culturally appropriate food is vital for good physical and mental wellbeing. Despite this, many minority families in Scotland face structural barriers and find their voices are missing from health and food policy discussions.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Foods
Healthy Planet, Healthy People: Catalyst Award 2025
Research into the viability and impact of an abattoir for private kill services in Lochaber
Small farms and crofters in Lochaber have difficulties accessing private kill abattoir services. This project is to research the feasibility of creating an abattoir, potentially including meat processing and sales, near Fort William for the wider Lochaber area. The objective is to improve local food systems and reduce carbon emissions. A simplified and shorten supply line could offer multiple benefits to Lochaber.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Seeding sustainable futures: Building food security through community action
Abundant Borders will save and freely share seeds with people who may not be able to afford to buy them and have little or no experience growing food. Seed saving is an ancient practice that preserves biodiversity, builds resilience, and empowers communities.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Foods
Pollinator Pals: A co-created civic arts and science project improving nature connection and biodiversity in a urban garden
The Pollinator Pals project aims to connect children aged 6-12 years with nature, belonging, and community in a socioeconomically deprived area of Glasgow.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Rescue. Preserve. Nourish: Turning Surplus into Sustenance
Run as a collaboration between Café Recharge co-founders Amanda Robinson and Amy Wight and Caroline Timmins, a product development technologist at Queen Margaret University, the Rescue. Preserve. Nourish: Turning Surplus into Sustenance project aims to investigate waste reduction through pilot dehydration trials using surplus vegetables and fruit.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Communities
Scran Fir Bees
Through her funded project, environmental artist Natalie Taylor will work in North Edinburgh to extend a series of existing public space artworks incorporating wildflowers to provide nectar-rich habitats and food sources for pollinators. The long-term vision is that these artworks, using large-scale text cut into the landscape, will join up to form a bee corridor across North Edinburgh.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Improving biodiversity in urban green spaces using participatory citizen science
Urban green areas play a significant role in supporting biodiversity, mitigating heat-related health risks and contributing to public health and resilience against climate change.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Communities
Owning Carfin Street Gardens
Offering access to 43 raised beds outside the People’s Pantry in Glasgow, Carfin Street Gardens encourages residents to learn about and take control of their food systems through weekly gardening sessions facilitated by a staff member.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Communities
Ecological transformation of the woodland edge at Dronley Community Woodland
Dronley Community Woodland is an area popular with walkers, runners, cyclists and horse riders, with over 20,000 visits annually. It is a multi-purpose woodland where biodiversity, timber production and recreation are equal priorities.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Scottish Borders orchard research project
The Borders has a rich history of orchards dating back to the establishment of the Border Abbeys. Previous local research has highlighted that old orchards and heritage fruit trees are being lost at a rapid rate but that many new orchards are being established.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Foods
Colvend Lochs aquatic plant survey
The Colvend and Southwick Community Council, with the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI), have been funded to undertake an aquatic and marginal plant survey of the lochs in the Colvend Community Council area.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Quarter century of discovery: 25 years of bottlenose dolphin photo-identification in the Hebrides
The Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust hold the longest time series of bottlenose dolphin images, collected from sightings in the Hebrides since 2000. Despite this, the data has not been updated or published for nearly a decade.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Am Monadh Ruadh: A living landscape
Am Monadh Ruadh, the Cairngorm Mountains are the only sub-arctic habitat in Britain. This landscape of plateaus, hills, and glens was once far more lived-in than it is today.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Full of Beans: A community film and food project
Take One Action brings communities together to harness the transformative potential of film and storytelling for collective change.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Foods
What is a sustainable cup of take away coffee?
South Seeds is a community organisation based in the South Central area of Glasgow. It works in partnership with residents and organisations within the local community to help improve the area’s appearance and feel. The group’s mission is to enable Southsiders to lead more sustainable lives.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Using compost teas in market gardens to enhance crop health, yield and build healthy soils
Lauriston Farm, run by a workers’ cooperative in North-West Edinburgh, is dedicated to sustainable food production, biodiversity, and community. Building soil health is central to our land stewardship and food production. Chemical fertilisers disrupt the balance of soil health, degrading microbial ecosystems.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Foods
Local pear cultivation and consumption
Pear fruits are an important source of nutrition and fibre with diverse forms: culinary, dessert, juice, and perry. Existing supermarket and wholesale supply chains rely almost entirely on imports of three varieties: Conference, Rocca, and Comice du Doyenne.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Foods
Cupar FoodStation Project
The Cupar Foodstation Project aims to conduct feasibility research into opening a food-themed enterprise and welfare hub in the Cupar town centre, offering a community-led solution and a people-centred approach delivered through local organisations and food producers.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Communities
Healthy Planet, Healthy People: Catalyst Award 2024
Exploring Sustainable Solutions for Food Waste in Island Communities
Eday, an island in the Orkney archipelago, has a small community of around 130 people. The community proposes to research and evaluate options to identify a sustainable – and possibly commercial – solution for reducing food waste in an island community.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Cataloguing commons
What are the challenges involved in organising a seed commons and making seeds accessible?
Catalyst Award – Healthy Foods
Our Right to Food Project
The Our Right to Food project is developing ways to measure the progress towards the right to good quality, affordable food in Scotland.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Foods
The Mycorrhizal Market Garden: what can we learn from fungal networks?
What are the structures, communication strategies, relationships, resources, and supports required to build a cooperative of independent growers that is sustainable, effective, and nourishing for those involved?
Catalyst Award – Healthy Foods
Sustainable food procurement for north Edinburgh
The Community Renewal Trust in Edinburgh is part of the R2 network of organisations that collaborate to achieve better outcomes in local communities.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Foods
Renfrewshire Land Connections
The Centre for Human Ecology proposes to assess and strengthen capabilities for regenerative land use to strengthen adaptation to climate change in Renfrewshire.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Communities
Dualchas: Dynamic connections between community and the land
The community, together with the cultural hub Grinneabhat, propose to investigate innovations that will enable the continuation and expansion of their existing food system.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Communities
Understanding the potential of a resident-led street closure programme – Play Streets in Inverness
Excessive motor vehicle use is an established problem affecting Scotland’s ability to meet its climate-change targets.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Communities
Willow Worlds
Tree planting has never been more important than now, but in Scotland, we face the problem of overgrazing by deer.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Porridge Power
Porridge Power will take a youth-led, place-based approach to help secondary school students understand and harness the power of the humble porridge oat.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Foods
Rebuilding Biodiversity in Campbeltown
A troubling biodiversity loss within Campbelltown has been identified by the South Kintyre Development Trust.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Thrift: Climate Conversations
Art Walk Projects aim to develop a series of public conversations with artists, scientists, farmers, landscape architects, and climatologists.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Project Year - 2023
Ecopoetics Report
Shaping sustainable food futures through education, engagement, and action for a healthy planet.
Public Learning Workshop 2023