What is River Hope?
River Hope is a new grassroots movement emerging in Stratford-on-Avon District in South Warwickshire. It involves individuals, community groups and others co-creating and implementing activities and events in, on, around and about our local water bodies, catchments and the biodiversity of their ecosystems.
We explore and express our sensory experiences with our local waters and Nature through the creative arts. We hold ceremonies by and with water and its biodiversity to honour its life-giving role and contribution to our place, history, society, economies and health and well-being. We engage in practical actions to restore and protect our local catchments and their wildlife and flora.
We take a positive narrative of gratitude, love and good stewardship for water as an essential element of thriving biodiversity and that supports all life. We aim to be good ancestors for future generations of all species in the web of life.
We are the First Ripples
As First Ripples, we are creating activities and events under themes of love, memory and stewardship.
Love
We use art, photography, music, song, dance, story, poetry, theatre, film, crafts and other creative arts to highlight how our senses such as listening and seeing enable us to experience our local water in its different forms and ecosystems.
Adopting the ways of ancient peoples in the British Isles and elsewhere, we hold seasonal ceremonies with water to bring people together for moments of quiet attention, gratitude and respect.
Memory
We celebrate local water-related memories of human history going back to the first peoples in this place. We look at springs, wells, aquifers, brooks, our three rivers, and their floodplains and wetlands in and around our towns and villages.
We look at how these relate to the physical structures (weirs, watermills, bridges, locks, canals, roads and railways), trade and livelihoods that have supported human settlement, farming and society here for many centuries.
Stewardship
We harness our hope into action through involvement in local citizen science testing water and encourage efforts to reduce different types of rubbish and pollution in our waterways.
We advocate for recreation, tourism, industry and farming that respects the water and all its biodiversity. This may include leaving some areas where the water meets the land as relatively undisturbed by humans or rewilded so that all the lifeforms that live there can recover and thrive.
River Hope acknowledges support from:
