Google Maps, for some unknown reason,  doesn't show the lovely oasis of the Cluny Gardens Allotments in Southend-on-Sea as green.  Don't they realise that the Benedictine monks of Prittlewell Priory gardened there for 400 years until Henry VIII scattered them to the four winds?  The current King of the Cluny Gardens is Tony Wagstaff who is a Reparation and Community Practitioner with Southend's  ISSP (Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Programme)...and, in ordinary language, a thoroughly nice bloke.  Since 2011 Tony has designed a garden at the Hampton Court Flower Show and won ten medals and awards.  Each year he takes a group of young people from the Early Help Family Support and Youth Offending Service and they create a memorable garden, some of which then go on to have a future life brightening up different parts of Southend.  In this podcast we hear from Tony and three of his volunteers, Rob, Curtis and Jake and from case worker, Ricardo, and social worker, Jane.

You can catch up with them at the Hampton Court Flower Show this year which runs from 5-11 July.  They are creating one of the big show gardens, The Ability Garden.  https://www.rhs.org.uk/shows-events/rhs-hampton-court-palace-garden-festival/gardens/2021/the-ability-garden
You can see The Therapeutic Garden talked about by Tony and Rob in the podcast here:
https://www.southend.gov.uk/community-1/hampton-court-flower-show
https://www.shootgardening.co.uk/article/southend-young-offenders-a-place-to-think-garden
The music is The Parisian played by Kevin Macleod (with thanks for making this available under Creative Commons license).

In Kolkata in India the virus is spreading rapidly through the city.  Many people are out of work and there are many newly homeless families living on the street with nothing to eat.   There have been two catastrophic cyclones and widespread flooding in the region.   The government is increasingly concerned about what is going to happen to the 'Covid orphans'.  

In this final podcast about Future Hope we hear from founders, Tim and Erica Grandage, CEO, Sujata Sen, School Principal, Madhu Ravi, and Senior Girl, Jhili, who sang and composed the music.  We also hear from alumni Rajesh and Mintu, who was the very first Future Hope boy.  Don’t miss little Naitik at the very end.  You can catch up with all Future Hope’s news on Twitter or Instagram or on their website www.futurehope.net.    They never stop helping other people to make the world a better place.

It is Mintu as a young boy who we see in the picture.

Education is a human right but one that millions of children are still denied. By providing underprivileged children with an education Future Hope School in Kolkata gives them the key to unlock opportunity; a chance to get a decent job, to escape poverty and to support their families & communities.   In Episode 2 of the Future Hope story we hear from three students who are achieving their dreams and also the amazing plans for the future from the founders, Tim and Erica Grandage, and their CEO, Sujata Sen.

https://www.futurehope.net/our-work/our-school/

Music from the pupils of Future Hope school in celebration of the birthday of Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore.

In the final episode we will hear about the extraordinary outreach work the whole school has been doing during the pandemic and Cyclone Amphan last summer and Cyclone Kaas which devastating West Bengal right now.

There are 100,000 street children in Kolkata.  At the railway stations children on their own take refuge on lit platforms at night, hoping to protect themselves from abuse. During the day they make a few rupees by rag picking, working as coolies or in roadside food stalls. Many are ill and malnourished and often they become addicted to glue, which helps them forget the trauma of their life.  Over the past three decades the lives of 3,000 of these children have been transformed by a an extraordinary couple, Tim and Erica Grandage, and their team at Future Hope.  I am telling this story in three parts, the first is The Early Years and in the next we'll hear from the children and the amazing things they have achieved with their lives and in the last we'll look at how everyone at Future Hope, teachers, students and alumnae have all reached out into the local community and much further afield to help during the Covid crisis and the devastation of the cyclone that ravaged the Sunderbans last summer.  Have your handkerchiefs ready and prepare to feel very humble.

You can catch up on Future Hope's news here:  https://www.futurehope.net

The music is a very old well-known folk song called 'Thakur Jamai' sung by Swapna Chakraborty.  The lyrics are about a woman telling her sister-in-law to put some extra rice in the cooking pan, dress up in a beautiful yellow sari because her husband (her sister-in-law’s husband or Jamai) is coming home, he’s on the way from the railway station, all dressed up like a dandy, chewing paan to make his lips red...'Get fish from the fisherman, get vegetables, get all ready to welcome him'.   It’s happy, celebratory song.  With thanks to the Bengal Foundation.

Salt marshes fringe much of the world’s low-lying coasts and they provide the perfect natural defence to the battering of the sea and increasing storm surges as a result of climate change and rising sea levels.  A day doesn't seem to go by without news of a further crumbling of the coastline so I thought it would be a great idea to talk to Dr. Ben Evans who is a coastal geomorphologist at the University of Cambridge with a particular interest in coastal wetlands and salt marshes.  He grew up on the Walton Backwaters in Essex and mud has dominated his life ever since.   Below are links to the Resist project he has been involved with and a couple of films that show the work they've been doing to calculate the resilience of a salt marsh to increasing force from the sea and help inform international policy of shoreline management...literally 'Hold the line, advance the line or retreat'....
With many thanks to Daniel Girdner for his exquisite playing of Niccolò Paganini's 'Romanza'.
You can listen to much more of his repertoire on his Youtube channel at   https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpWzv0rZVxH8tLzMMnLJFNmUlDxZBeoSY

https://www.nerc-resist.uk
https://youtu.be/4ZoPBfm2aBY
https://youtu.be/P9m7vAdqsWc
https://data.unep-wcmc.org/datasets/43

Petra Potasse is a talented shipwright...a rare female in a male world.  She lives on her beloved 118-year old Dutch barge, the 'Cornelia Anna', and she sails to where the work is.  Since she came over from the Netherlands 13 years ago, leaving a career as an English and Arts and Crafts teacher behind,  she has worked on several projects up and down the East Anglian coast as lead shipwright and as teacher and trainer, with the Mayflower Project, to a younger generation of boatbuilders.   For the last three years she has worked with Richard and Steve Wyatt at Bedwells Boatyard  in Walton-on-the-Naze.

Waltz in A minor by Frederic Chopin played by Aya Higuchi in 2015.  With thanks to commons.wikimedia.org.
This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

The historic port of Mistley in Essex has been blighted for the past 12 years with a 2-metre high fence which appeared, with no consultation, all along the quay...130 metres.   All the barges and little boats that used to come could no longer dock, no more crabbing, no feeding of the swans and the view of the estuary from the old cottages on the quay was forever pixellated.   This is the story of how a community fought back.   We hear from Nancy Bell, Head Housekeeper of the Grayson Perry house at Wrabness, James Christopher ex-film critic of The Times, Dame Edme Beverage (aka William Meston) keeper of the Grapevine Inn, ex-lawyer Simon and Bettina Bullimore, joint driving force of the campaign, Dina Southwell artist, Sherri Singleton proprietress of The Mistley Thorn and other highly talented members of the cast of the pantomime, long in the making, 'The Curse of Foggy Quay' written and directed by James Christopher.  You can find out all about it and join the fundraising campaign at:
www.freethequay.co.uk

HMP Warren Hill sits right next to the sea on the Suffolk coast and, in non-pandemic times, it buzzes all day long with activity and purpose.  The prison takes residents serving long-term sentences from the rest of the prison system and aims to prepare them for release.  They are out of their cells for 12 hours a day.   The Vestey Project and the music workshops run by Britten Pears Arts are two of many initiatives that are welcomed and facilitated by the prison.  

In this podcast we hear from Rebecca White, founding director of Your Own Place, and her mentee who, through sheer determination, has happily settled on the outside.  He’s doing voluntary work and is very articulate about the benefits of being mentored and the ‘enabling environment’ at HMP Warren Hill.  We also hear from Judy Dow, who is Head of Philanthropy at the Norfolk Community Foundation about her journey as a Vestey mentor.   I wasn't able to interview Judy's mentee for reasons that will be apparent by the end of the podcast.  The music was recorded by residents of the prison with Britten Pears Arts in 2019.   They've worked with the prison for many, many years and each series of music workshops ends in a concert which is open to family and friends. 

https://www.yourownplace.org.uk/get-involved/volunteer-mentoring-prisons/

https://snapemaltings.co.uk/criminal-justice/

The last in the current series is this Christmas wreath of flowers, rosehips and bramble foliage  entwined together with all the voices, the sounds and the music that have appeared during this extraordinary year.  I had no idea that when I called this podcast, back in January, 'Changing Lives', the title would prove so prescient.   The podcast suddenly changed completely as it ran along to keep up with events and reinvent itself...interviews moving from homes, offices and community halls to Zoom and more Zoom.  But with Zoom I could suddenly travel all over the world and, with YouTube, I discovered a bewitching world of musicians who have allowed me so generously to use their work.  All the details of the podcasts you'll find in their own introductions but the musicians I will mention here.  The next series of 'Changing Lives' will start at the end of January.  Happy Christmas and thank you very much to all the brilliant people who let me into their lives with my microphone and to you for listening!

Guitar played by Daniel Girdner 'Sí Bheag, Sí Mhór' composed by Turlough O'Carolan and 'Valse Française' by Francis Kleynjans https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCygDSDPO59LBldtbnoG8lMQ
Band music:  The Pinnacle with the Irene Taylor Trust https://irenetaylortrust.com
Piano played by Henrietta Faire (my sister).
Hurdy-gurdy played by Andrey Vinogradov https://andreyvinogradov.com
Flute played by Tim Macri accompanied by Luis Avila https://www.youtube.com/user/tootuncommon51210

Jenny Hudson was paralysed in a riding accident four years ago but, despite being told that she would never walk again, she is walking with the help of an exoskeleton and a gifted physiotherapist, Louis Martinelli, from Hobbs Rehabilitation in Winchester.  The Ekso Bionics company's mission statement is 'we use technology to empower human mobility' and it feels like the potential of the exoskeleton is boundless.

• 'Sarah you have made me sound rather glorious in this clever podcast which is very kind - I have to add that I could not have been anywhere near the person you portray without two key people - my husband who we hear in the podcast and Joanne Simpson.  Jo was my carer when I left hospital and she has been with me ever since. I cannot tell you or make anyone understand just what having Jo’ s support truly means . She is reliable, smart, unflappable, observant, good company and funny - I could not imagine life now without her and I certainly could not be the remarkable person that you say I am without her. '     Jenny Hudson.

With many thanks to Daniel Girdner for his playing of Estudio en Mi Menor by Francisco Tárrega.  You can hear his music on his YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCygDSDPO59LBldtbnoG8lMQ

This is the website for Jenny's pool/studio:  https://www.lawfordhousepool.co.uk

and the link to the company who makes the exoskeleton:  https://eksobionics.com/company/

and the organisations who have been instrumental in helping Jenny on her road to recovery:
https://theairambulanceservice.org.uk
https://www.spinal.co.uk
http://www.rstrust.com