Time outdoors acts as preventative medicine for workplace burnout, absenteeism and mental health struggles.
This is a 12-week preventative wellbeing programme for Bristol and London-based professionals, running from September 2026, led by wellbeing practitioners in two community gardens.
Someone in your team has asked whether the company can fund their place on the Nula Green Social Prescribing pilot, and this page is here to give you what you need to make that decision quickly. Here are the budget lines you could tap into:
A 12-week structured workplace wellbeing programme based on the same Green Social Prescribing methodology the NHS evaluated across England between 2021 and 2023. It runs weekly two community gardens in Bristol and London, with sessions led by wellbeing practitioners, and participants meet as a cohort of around 14 people.
The aim is to create a culture of preventative mental health support. The pilot builds the kind of regular, structured contact with the outdoors that supports wellbeing before it becomes a sickness absence problem.
In 2024, a University of Oxford study of 46,336 UK workers across 233 organisations compared people who used typical individual‑level wellbeing interventions (like mindfulness, resilience training, stress management and wellbeing apps) with those who did not. Overall, participants who signed up for these initiatives were no better off. The one exception, out of around 90 interventions tested, was giving people the chance to volunteer or do charity work, and this pilot is structured around that finding. Participants spend twelve weeks contributing to a working community garden, with a qualified art therapist, alongside other professionals doing similar work.
The methodology layered on top of the volunteering element is Green Social Prescribing. Peer-reviewed evaluation of the NHS Test and Learn cohort, published in 2025, reported a 67% improvement in overall wellbeing, a 70% improvement in anxiety, and a 62% improvement in depression among participants, with results after 12 weeks comparable to those of short-term cognitive behavioural therapy and an 85% engagement rate across the cohort. An independent national analysis went on to estimate £1.88 of social value generated for every £1 spent.