Good from Woods
Exploring what people get out of being in the woods

What is the Good from Woods project?
Good from Woods is a community of researchers exploring and reporting on the health and wellbeing outcomes of spending time in the woods.
Originating in a National Lottery funded partnership between University of Plymouth and The Silvanus Trust, Good from Woods has focused on supporting outdoor practitioners to carry out research on the activities they provide and identifying and testing appropriate methodologies for capturing the impacts of woodland based activity.
The Good from Woods web pages host a toolkit for practitioner-led evaluation and research, developed by practitioners themselves.
The toolkit explores and advises on practical aspects of engaging people of all ages and backgrounds in wellbeing focused research, in a woodland or outdoor setting.
It is accompanied by 12 reports from practitioners’ research into the health and happiness outcomes of woodland activities (ranging from forest education to community ownership of woodlands), using aspects of the toolkit approach.
What did it research?
Good from Woods aimed to explore how people are benefiting, personally and socially, from woodland activities in the southwest.
Currently, initiatives across the region deliver woodland activities ranging from forest education to tree planting and recreation. While each initiative may know what they’re achieving, this information is not available to others to inform new projects, funders, researchers or policy makers.
Good from Woods supported organisations to find out and record how people taking part in woodland activities feel about the experience, themselves and their community. It has built a shared evidence base of how woodland activities promote physical, psychological, emotional and social wellbeing.
How did the project find out what’s Good from Woods?
Good from Woods collaborated with organisations which provide woodland activities in the southwest and:
Why do we need to understand how we feel Good from Woods?
Exploring the evidence of how woodland activities can benefit the health of people and communities can:
Our partners
The project was guided by a steering group comprising our key partners:
Practitioner researchers:
Forest of Avon Trust, Play Torbay, Embercombe, Woodland Trust, Ruskin Mill College, Otterhead Forest School, National Trust.
See the case studies produced by practitioner researchers as part of their Good from Woods research.
Our funders
The project was funded by the National Lottery through the Big Lottery Fund’s Research Programme which aims to:
The proposal, Social cohesion and well-being deriving from woodland activities, was one of only 57 successful bids to the Research programme.
A further contribution has been received from the Forest Education Initiative (now the Forest Education Network).