ATU Receives King's Award for Voluntary Service

Andover Trees United (ATU) is one of only three winners in Hampshire of the very first King’s Award for Voluntary Service. Formerly known as The Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service, which was established in 2002, this is the highest honour a local voluntary group can receive in the UK and is equivalent to an MBE. This prestigious National Honour recognises outstanding contributions made to local communities by groups voluntarily devoting their time for the benefit of others. It sets the national benchmark for excellence in volunteering, with the work of those awarded being judged of the highest standard.

ATU has received the award for “Providing conservation education for all ages and inspiring love and respect for the natural world.” The charity was established in 2011 with the goal of reaching all young people in the Andover area and giving them the opportunity to learn about, understand, engage with, and look after the natural world. Between 2012 and 2021 a total of around 10,000 local children planted 10,000 trees to create Harmony Woods, a community woodland on former arable land. Harmony Woods is part of one of Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Woods, and HRH The Princess Royal, in her capacity as Head of the Woodland Trust, planted the first tree. Schools’ tree planting still continues each year at other sites.

We provide a range of opportunities for the local community to get involved in volunteering. This includes practical work like planting trees, habitat management, and maintenance tasks, as well as citizen science, woodworking and green crafts, music and art, and more.

We support young people beyond tree planting through ‘Plant For The Planet’ academies; the Nature in Harmony Exchange Project youth team; a graduate internship scheme; sessions for scouting, guiding, and young carer groups; school holiday activity programmes; arts activities; an annual community archaeology dig, and more.

In 2017, Andover Trees United established ‘Six Trees and Six Flowers’, a programme whose core aim is to support schools to combine the arts and nature to improve first hand understanding of and the opportunity to care for the natural world as part of mainstream teaching. The later ‘Voices in Harmony’ project was designed to provide this through the element of music and, as with all ATU projects, to involve and flow out into communities beyond the schools involved.

Hundreds of volunteers participate in ATU activities each year in one way or another. For the first decade of the charity’s life it was completely powered by volunteers - paid staff members have only been a recent addition - making them the reason for the charity’s existence. Our work is volunteer-led, and is designed to help members of the community to step up and help their community to achieve something important.

ATU is one of 262 local charities, social enterprises, and voluntary groups to receive The King’s Award for Voluntary Service this year. The Award reminds us of all the ways fantastic volunteers are contributing to their local communities and working to make life better for those around them.

Recipients are announced annually on 14th November, The King’s Birthday. Award winners this year are wonderfully diverse and include volunteer groups from across the UK. The two other winners in Hampshire are Southampton Sunday Lunch Project, for “Providing a safe and welcoming space to get a nutritious, hot meal with good company for all in need”, and Level Up Gosport, for “Enabling young people with additional needs to level up their employability skills via community volunteering”. There are 12 other environmental groups among the recipients. See an interactive map of all awardees here, and a list of all awardees with brief description here.

Representatives of ATU will receive the award crystal and certificate from Nigel Atkinson, Lord-Lieutenant of Hampshire. In addition, two volunteers from ATU will attend a garden party at Buckingham Palace in 2024, along with other recipients of this year’s Award.

Wendy Davis, founder of ATU, says:

“Firstly, I would like to say how honoured and grateful we are to have received this award, that will highlight all the hard work we have done. The KAVS will hopefully bring us elevation, as the work that we do is still not as high a priority within UK society as it should be. Having our work acknowledged by an award so prestigious as KAVS is immeasurable. To have our volunteers valued so much and the tireless work they do acknowledged, gives us the motivation to continue.

This award will allow our community to see our charity and its efforts in a new light, that we hope will inspire and encourage more people to come be a part of our ever growing community, be it often or not. The level of this award will have the desired impact of letting people know the importance of the work that we do, because environmental work still struggles to have the level of urgency that is required, in people's everyday lives that it needs to be. 

The Award allows us to tell everyone involved, from the thousands of school children to the incredibly hard working team that has made it all possible, well done! The work you have done IS important and amazing. We hope it may also allow us to reach a much wider audience, giving us the opportunity to demonstrate that this model is achievable at community level, and has genuine benefit to people of all ages and the institutions within it. We hope to inspire communities outside of our own, and promote the idea to policy makers to support the replication of the ATU model up and down the country.”