The Green Pledge Project
In October 2023 we started on our latest major lottery funded project, the 'Green Pledge Project' having been awarded £246,800 to focus on cataloguing large environmental collections and developing community-led collecting initiatives whilst reducing the carbon footprint of our service.
The Green Pledge project will continue into Autumn, but the list of achievements is impressive.
Over 9000 maps and plans deposited by the Environment Agency have been catalogued and are now searchable for the first time. 
A series of thought-provoking podcasts on environmental matters has been produced - https://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/archives/our-projects/the-green-pledge-project/podcast/
Solar panels have been installed on the archives building.
Our in-house accredited conservators have also been leading the way, working with the National Archives, in the testing and development of passive storage to create safer and more stable environments for our archive strongrooms.
From January 2024 onwards, we have been working with Project Grow CIC and the Wiggly Charities to grow fruit and vegetables in the Gloucestershire Heritage Hub community garden, empowering local people.
At the beginning of June, the work of the Green Pledge Project was further showcased in the Cheltenham Science Festival with 5230 people, many of them school children, visiting our display, appropriately erected in a shed which is now part of the garden at our local school, Kingsholm Primary.
Our outreach officer, Marion Hill, has been giving inspiring talks about our area’s green heritage. When she visited the Wotton Area Climate Action Network, audience member, Sam Munton, decided to come to the archives for a first visit, do some research of her own and has written up the experience in a wonderful blog about how local archives reveal landscape change and highlight the impact of grassroots efforts to support nature. You can read this here Digging Into the Past to Shape a Greener Future
The Green Pledge Project will be drawing to a close in terms of delivering events at the end of September but watch out for our end of project celebration! We hope that the legacy of our work will carry on well beyond and we are currently developing online exhibitions which will stay on the website alongside the podcasts and tastes of the collection. To see all of these as well as the up-coming events please visit https://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/archives/our-projects/the-green-pledge-project/.
All of this work has been possible thanks to funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.