Exciting New Hub Base For CDE Birmingham and West Midlands
CDE Birmingham and West Midlands is now based at Dolphin Women’s Centre in Ward End Birmingham, part of Washwood Heath Adaption & Sustainability Hub (WASH). Hub co-ordinator Jaime Jackson tells us about this new phase, and what to look forward to over the coming year.

CDE Birmingham and West Midlands is now based at Dolphin Women’s Centre in Ward End Birmingham, part of Washwood Heath Adaption & Sustainability Hub (WASH). The WASH is a five-year nature, climate and culture hub led by Birmingham and Black Country Wildlife Trust, New Leaf Sustainability Limited, Norton Hall Children’s of Family Centre, Dolphin Women’s Centre and the Friends of Ward End Park.
Following a successful bid to the National Lottery’s Climate Action programme, a new creative climate Hub in Washbrook Heath launched on July 1st 2024. This follows four years of project and networking work in Birmingham and the West Midlands through the CDE Birmingham and West Midlands Hub, along with community partners and the local authority. The funding will provide one day a week for our hub coordinator Jaime Jackson, based at Dolphin Women’s Centre:
The Hub will continue engaging diverse local communities, predominantly South Asian and Pakistani heritage groups, in exploring their cultural connections to nature and using arts-based approaches to foster climate resilience and environmental stewardship.
CDE Birmingham and West Midlands is a collective of artists, sustainability and cultural organisations, including Sustainability West Midlands, Sustainable Arts Organisations, Salt Road, Climate Psychology Alliance, Handsworth Association of Schools, Herefordshire New Leaf Sustainability Ltd, Birmingham MAC, Birmingham Rep and New Art Gallery, Walsall.

Leveraging arts and culture to connect communities to nature
Artists’ ability to cross social and cultural boundaries and facilitate meaningful dialogues about culture, heritage, and the environment have been integral to the work of this network from the beginning. The team use arts-based workshops and activities, such as painting, drawing, and forest school programmes, to help participants from the local community explore their personal and cultural connections to nature. The approach emphasises artist-led and peer-led learning, and highlights the strengths of individual community participants to help shape their individual engagement experience, rather than a “lowest common denominator” approach. Through this, we have co-produced high-quality artworks which can be exhibited and shared with wider audiences.
On February 15th 2022, the consultation for Our City of Nature Plan for Birmingham was launched by Birmingham City Council, starting the exciting conversation on how the city treats its natural environment and how it thinks about the future of its parks and green spaces over the next 25 years. The council has outlined a vision for change, opening up equal access by ensuring all of its green spaces achieve the Birmingham Fair Standard, a way of assessing green spaces that directly respond to environmental justice. With the cultural and cross-public sector cutbacks BCC has suffered, it is essential that we work together to deliver this forward-thinking strategy. The CDE Birmingham and West Midlands Hub will support the council as the point of contact for Birmingham’s part in the Biophilic City Network.
The concept of Biophilic Cities which puts nature at the heart of urban development, is inspiring innovative minds around the globe. Alongside ‘green’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘energy-efficient’, ‘biophilia’ is entering the vocabulary of the ecologically minded and is changing lives for the better amongst urban populations. We seek to address the damaging view that cities are separate from nature, and to creatively explore the idea that we are nature.
Birmingham is the first city in the United Kingdom to produce an Environmental Justice Map that highlights the areas most in need of green spaces and green infrastructure. Birmingham intends to be a green and sustainable city and is a leader in connecting health and nature. The Hub is based in the East Birmingham area with local communities predominantly of Pakistani heritage. This provides us with opportunities to develop Ethnobotanical (the scientific exploration of traditional knowledge and practices surrounding plant use) links across Muslim communities in the West Midlands and Pakistan, exploring the cultural importance of traditional uses with plants and the relationship between nature and the sacred.

Addressing systemic challenges and building partnerships
The team has worked to connect local communities to the Hub and to build relationships with key stakeholders, including public sector partners and community organisations, to enable broader engagement and trust. The Hub now plans to raise additional funding and support to sustain and expand its work in supporting and learning from the role of culture to grow connections with nature among communities and stakeholders.
This will lead to a planned CDE Cultural Assembly collaboration with New Art Gallery West Midlands in April 2025, as part of their ‘More Than Human’ exhibition and engagement program. The CDE cultural assembly will be led by 20 young people from Birmingham and the Black Country, to help expand the Hub’s reach and impact. They will work with CDE Birmingham and West Midlands artists to co-produce artwork exhibited at the Gallery as part of the exhibition.

The Team
Artists running the Hub include Jaime Jackson, Stephen Whitehead, Nelambari Phalkey and Soobie Whitfield.
Soobie is a freelance Applied Theatre Practitioner, workshop facilitator, Dance / Theatre Teacher and Choreographer. Particularly interested in creative projects based around the local Community, Heritage and Environment.
Nelambari was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Birmingham EU Horizon 2020 project- AGRUMIG: “Leaving something behind” – Migration governance and agricultural & rural change in whom” communities: comparative experience from Europe, Asia and Afric”. She is a freelance researcher and visual artist at the New Art Gallery, Walsall, West Midlands, and K11xArtReview Artist-in-Residence, Wuhan, Hubei Province, China.
Jaime is a visual artist and producer; he collaborates with climate and ecology crisis scientists, including sociology, human and environmental geography, marine science, ethnobotany and eco-psychology. He develops collaborative art practices to communicate and interpret climate change science through the lens of biophilia (love of nature). He engages vulnerable communities in digital environmental projects through relational practice and co-production; Jaime created digital and traditional interventions in this gap to re-imagine or re‐connect these biophilic connections with nature via contemporary art using moving image installations and architectural projections.
Stephen is a relational visual artist, director of the Environmental CIC Countershade and Green Mentor for the Handsworth Association of Schools. Stephen is an environmental artist and educator who has run interactive ecological workshops and designed installations and exhibitions at major national events venues and international exchanges in Europe*. Through his 20 years as a socially engaged artist, he has developed and run dozens of school programmes and initiatives in primary and secondary schools, universities and community spaces.
CDE Birmingham and West Midlands have delivered workshops and events for MAC Birmingham’s Big Green Weekend 2023, Julie’s Bicycle’s We Make Tomorrow Summit at Birmingham Rep 2022, as well as socially engaged workshops at Dolphin Women’s centre. The Hub recently also worked with The Nature of Cities Festival to run the Signs of the Underground field trip in Berlin on June 7th, 2024, in partnership with The University of Amsterdam, Green Hill Gallery Berlin and Kulturschöpfer, e.V., bringing together art, business, and social issues. Learn more or connect with the Hub here.