BLACK mountains land use partnership
The Black Mountains Land Use Partnership (a CIO uniting farming families, major landowners, and conservation bodies across the Welsh uplands) needed pre-grant support to develop a credible, fundable proposal for the National Lottery Heritage Fund's Nature Networks Fund. The stakes were high: without securing this grant, the partnership risked dissolution and a decade of hard-won ecological and community momentum would be lost.
Client: Black Mountains Land Use Partnership
Environmental communications
strategic development
grant writing
stakeholder engagement
What we did
We worked alongside the partnership to translate a complex, multi-stakeholder landscape vision into a coherent strategy that fed into the funding application, stress-testing the logic, sharpening the project's internal consistency and drafting supporting documentation. The work required holding two things in tension simultaneously: the statutory requirements of a major public funder and the fragile trust of a grazier community with good reason to be wary of top-down conservation.
The Black Mountains is not a simple landscape to work in. Over 10,500 hectares of registered common land is grazed by many farming families, managed across multiple private estates and statutory bodies, designated as an SSSI, and sitting within a National Park, all while the farming community navigates the upheaval of post-Brexit agricultural policy. Getting the application right meant understanding where the genuine tensions lay: between conservation ambition and grazier autonomy, between funder compliance requirements and the language that would land well in the hill, between what funders want to hear and what a community will actually own. We drafted carefully, flagging where institutional language risked alienating the people the project depended on, and offered alternative framings that kept the community at the centre without softening the ecological ambition.
The difference it made
The project received a confirmed grant award of just under £1 million, covering April 2026 to March 2029. The project will restore degraded blanket bog across the Waun Fach plateau, establish cattle-based conservation grazing across priority upland habitats, and build the coordination infrastructure the farming community needs to access the Sustainable Farming Scheme's collaborative tier. The longer bet is that it demonstrates something replicable: that upland communities can lead nature recovery on their own terms, without ceding control to the institutions that usually drive it.
