West Essex Group
Surveying all the footpaths in a Group’s area on a regular basis is a huge task. West Essex Group’s innovative scheme breaks an essential task down into manageable chunks. The less there is to do, the more people volunteer!
West Essex Group launched its innovative Adopt a Parish scheme at their AGM in 1990. Prior to the AGM, much detailed preparation work had to be done to make the scheme workable.
Firstly, thirty-seven Ordnance Survey maps (1;25,000) scale were purchased, which covered the whole of the West Essex area. These were carefully marked up to show the boundary of the 27 parishes and each path given its proper reference number (found on official definitive maps).
Secondly, Path Problem Report Forms were then designed and drawn up. The forms request essential information in a standardised format: the name of the parish, the name of its Adopter, the date of the survey, the path number, a description of the problem and a grid reference.
The AGM was well attended and the new scheme was carefully explained, illustrated with a large coloured hand-drawn map showing the outline of the West Essex area and the parishes within it. Each parish showed the number of paths it contained and their total mileage. Attendees were then simply invited to adopt a parish. At the AGM and a subsequent coffee evening, nearly all the parishes were adopted. The scheme was now up and running, with the Adopters meeting up regularly to swap notes and share information. The new Adopters were each given a pack which contained marked-up maps for their parish, a list of the paths – giving the number of each path and its grid reference at start and finish - together with several report forms.
Adopters commit to checking all the paths in their parish at least once a year and report any problems to Frank Holzman, the current co-ordinator of the scheme. Frank in turn then reports these to the Highway Authority. There are no other targets or deadlines given, as the scheme is deliberately designed to be very flexible. The Adopters meet up once a year to discuss progress and outcomes and Frank has a space in the in the Group walk programme and newsletter where he lists all the reports that have been made. In this way, Adopters are kept informed of the success of the scheme and can see what their time and efforts are achieving. Frank spends a few hours per week on administrating the scheme, but the biggest workload was a one-off at the beginning – getting all those parish maps drawn up and notated. The beauty of the scheme is that it breaks a huge task down into manageable chunks and everyone involved is motivated by a sense of team spirit.
