Birmingham Settlement

A Place Where Everyone is Welcome

Lizzie Forrester — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:32:20 +0000

We spoke to community member and eco-activist Toqueer Ahmed Quyyam about why he thinks green space in the city is important, what the Birmingham Settlement Nature & Wellbeing Centre means to him, and his work as a budding environmental ambassador.

What brought you to the Nature & Wellbeing Centre?

“It was just after Covid, around 2023, and the Red Shed had recently been built. I live locally and have always enjoyed walking, so I would pass by on my strolls around Edgbaston Reservoir. I saw a welcoming sign at the site entrance, so I wandered in to be greeted by friendly staff and volunteers who told me about the activities on offer.

I always feel welcome here, it’s been good for my health and wellbeing. I’ve always appreciated the tranquillity of the Reservoir and taking time to hear the birds and spot wildlife.

I also have an interest in the environment; I’ve been a volunteer campaigner with Birmingham Friends of the Earth and I have my own blog and website where I enjoy writing about environmental issues and my adventures in green action. I want to be an ambassador – to spread the message that nature is for everyone –whether that’s volunteering, or just spending time outdoors.”

Can you tell us more about your relationship with green spaces?

“I always enjoyed visiting parks as a child and playing football with my friends, but there was never the opportunity for much else. Then in 2019 I went on a coach trip to the Peak District – it was my first ever time visiting the countryside and it was a lifechanging experience. It led me to write my first article – Kinder in Colour.

Many people take it for granted that they can access the countryside, but as a British Asian living in inner-city Birmingham, I didn’t feel like it was a space for me. Being part of a group, I felt a new confidence. It also made me realise that sometimes, barriers can be in our mind. Before, I’d always felt a fear – will I be welcome? Most people I know live in towns and cities and feel very disconnected from the great outdoors. It felt like I was stepping into the unknown.

That trip gave me the confidence to actively seek out nature on my doorstep. Lots of people might walk by spaces like the Nature & Wellbeing Centre and think it’s not for them, but I say come in and find out more – just like I did! I now feel so more confident, I’ve met new people and made new friends.

I have plans to go further afield to the Clent Hills, and I hope to join the Birmingham Ramblers. I was also truly humbled to be given the Benjamin Zephaniah Localism Award in 2025 at the Aston Villa Foundation for my role in championing diverse communities to access the countryside and green spaces, and I’m an active member of Footsteps.”

How does nature help you?

“It brings me great joy, a sense of peace and tranquillity. Walking around the Reservoir listening to the sounds of the geese and ducks, it’s like a sensory experience for your mind. It’s also sparked a newfound interest in photography, leading me to find a nature photography group.

We’re so lucky in Birmingham to have the Reservoir so close to the city centre – it encourages everyone to take a walk around. It’s a safe place, there are always people nearby, whether they’re running, walking, or taking their dog for a walk, you’re never alone.”

What would you say to others wanting to spend more time in green spaces?

“At first sight, coming to places like the Nature & Wellbeing Centre might feel intimidating but there are so many friendly people out there – coming to Birmingham Settlement helps you do things you wouldn’t usually consider – and it’s great for health! You can try so many different activities outdoors – I love the amphitheatre space, and opportunities to get involved with organisations like the RSPB.

I look forward to coming knowing I will always be welcome, there’s a cup of tea and a friendly face. I feel connected to everyone – there’s no better place than the Red Shed! Thank you to all the staff and volunteers!”

Toqueer’s top tips for getting out and about in the city

Libraries are a fantastic resource – visit your local library to research what’s around you, use the internet and ask questions – don’t be shy about what you want to ask, there will definitely be someone to help you. There are lots of other likeminded people are out there – you are not alone.

2. Why not volunteer? – I’ve discovered that there are so many volunteer opportunities in nature for charities – whether it’s a couple of hours a month, it can be flexible to your own time and needs. It’s a great way to meet likeminded people, gain new skills and confidence – volunteering also opens up other opportunities and interests.

3. Be adventurous! Just that really! Get out and do it! Give it a go – whether it’s a new year’s resolution or a special birthday or simply an ordinary day, why not get out!

If you have been inspired by Toqueer – let us know! Pop into the Red Shed and say hello to our friendly team, or email natureandwellbeing@bsettlement.org.uk to find out how you can get involved. We’d love to welcome you too.

Taking Action for Nature in Ladywood

Lizzie Forrester — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:29:24 +0000

In March, the Birmingham Settlement Nature & Wellbeing Centre opened for a series of events as part of the WMCA Nature Call to Action Campaign, supporting people across the West Midlands to get outside to enjoy their local green space and support nature to thrive.

We welcomed over 200 participants to our 3-acre Ladywood site over three weekend campaign days, inviting visitors to dip into as much (or as little!) as they liked, while enjoying the green space.

Visitors took part in seed sowing, bulb planting, making seed bombs, composting demos, pond dipping, exploring the overnight moth trap (an exciting first at the Nature & Wellbeing Centre!) a bird walk round the Reservoir, and on-site species identification through our Citizen Science project, Nature Navigators.

We also hosted an Open House for World Climate Day, inviting local people to help us in taking meaningful local action for the environment – with a neighbourhood litter pick and sign-making in support of nature, as well as activities encouraging children and families to get their hands in the earth in Roots Forest School.

If you missed out, take a look at our regular weekly timetable at the Nature & Wellbeing Centre – with plenty of opportunity to get involved with your local green space through volunteering and environmental stewardship, weekly beginners gardening, outdoor wellbeing activities and much, much more!

Staff Spotlight: Meet Luke!

Amy Cubberley — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 14:20:37 +0000

Meet Luke, our new Senior Community Action Worker! We sat down and asked him a few questions about his role.

Luke has joined us recently at the Kingstanding Sports & Community Centre and brings a wealth of experience in community-based activities and services and plenty of new ideas for our centre. Look out for him leading one of our varied activity sessions!

What does your role as Senior Community Action Worker look like on a day-to-day basis?

“My role on a day to day basis is to be that friendly face around the [Sports & Community] Centre, whether it’s towards my co-workers or the general public who use our centre. I also have the role of creating new links or strengthening current links with the public and outside organisations so we can deliver the best to the local community, helping support everyone through development and sustainable change.”

What are you most excited about in this role?

“I’m most excited about the potential the centre has to grow even more. Coming into this role i have been welcomed not just by staff but the local users of the centre already, which makes me even more excited to contribute further to this growing charity.”

What made you want to work here at Birmingham Settlement?

“I have previously worked alongside Birmingham Settlement through another organisation, and even then i saw the potential and the level of engagement with the local community was far greater than that I’ve seen elsewhere and it’s something i had to be a part of.”

What do you enjoy outside of work?

“I enjoy spending time with my son either going on walks or on adventures, I am also a big football player (although I’m past my prime now). Staying fit and healthy is something I really enjoy. One other thing I’m passionate about is my PC, which i built from scratch and use apps such as premier pro or photoshop to edit pictures and videos others have sent me.”

Is there anything you would like to share with our community?

“A message I would like to share with the community is that the Birmingham Settlement Sports & Community Centre is one of the most friendly and welcoming places, so please don’t be shy to pop in to see us – even if it’s for a cup of tea and a biscuit! You never know, we might be able to introduce you to something you never thought you’d ever do, whether it’s tai-chi, arts and crafts or improving your fitness.”

Be sure to say hello to Luke if you see him around the Sports & Community Centre! To see our full activity timetable, visit the ‘What’s On?’ page by clicking here.

An Afternoon with City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra!

Amy Cubberley — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 12:20:47 +0000

We welcomed the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) to the Sports & Community Centre for a ‘Cuppa Concert’ afternoon of music, dancing, and instrument-playing!

We saw an amazing turnout for our afternoon concert with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO). Following the theme ‘Best of British’, attendees arrived donning flags, colourful outfits, and accessories, ready for plenty of music and dancing. Combinig a mix of classical and hit songs from British composers, CBSO took us on a journey from Scotland, to Wales, to Ireland, to England, and back again with their varied ensemble. With well-known classic songs such as Danny Boy, Sky Boat Song, Dambusters March, Palladio, and much more, as well as a Harp rendition of UB40’s Red Red Wine and Tom Jones’ Delilah, attendees enjoyed getting involved playing instruments and waving scarves around to the sound of the music.

The afternoon was enjoyed by people of all ages getting involved in singing, dancing, and playing along – instruments were handed out to all attendees to join in the fun with the Orchestra! Thank you to the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for such an amazing afternoon at the Sports and Community Centre – keep your eyes peeled for the next installment!

Spring has Sprung! An Update from our Centres

Lizzie Forrester — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:49:55 +0000

Get the latest news from our centres with Birmingham Settlement’s Spring Updates! As always there’s plenty happening; read on to find out more.

Download the Update for the Kingstanding Sports & Community Centre here.

Download the Update for the Ladywood Nature & Wellbeing Centre here.

You can also sign-up to our mailing list to receive our quarterly ‘What’s On’ e:bulletin (don’t forget to check your junk and add us to your safe senders!).

Make a Difference: Vacancy for Ladywood NNS Community Lead

Lizzie Forrester — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 14:12:46 +0000

Ladywood Community Lead

Birmingham Settlement is seeking an enthusiastic and community-minded individual to join our Neighbourhood Network Scheme team. This is a great opportunity to join a progressive charity making a real difference to people’s lives in Ladywood.

About the Role

Job Title: Ladywood Community Lead
Salary: £27,583 per annum pro rata
Hours: 21 hours per week (flexible)
Location: Birmingham Settlement – based at Money Advice Centre, Alma House, Newtown Shopping Centre, B19 2AB (with outreach work across Ladywood)
Contract: Initial contract to 31st March 2027 (extension subject to funding)

In this varied role you will:

Be on the ground in Ladywood mapping local assets, building partnerships and identifying gaps in provision
Champion co-production and citizen voice
Support Birmingham City Council’s prevention-first approach to adult social care, ensuring adults aged 18-49 living with long-term disabilities can access community-based support and lead happy, healthy and independent lives.
Support local organisations through small grant applications and the wider capacity-building programme
Represent the NNS across community events, steering groups and citywide forum

Who We Are

Founded in 1899, Birmingham Settlement works at the heart of Birmingham’s communities to tackle social inequality and support people to live happy, healthy, fulfilling lives. We focus on:

Improving financial resilience
Building individual and community wellbeing
Developing skills, confidence, and voice
Driving environmental awareness and action
Creating a sustainable organisation

We do this through advice, training, wellbeing activities and partnerships, empowering people to overcome barriers and take positive action on issues that matter most to them.

How to Apply

Please familiarise yourself with all elements of the Job Description and advert below, complete the General Application Form and Equality & Diversity Form on our Vacancies page and send to recruitment@bsettlement.org.uk

Closing date: Tuesday 7 April 2026 at 5pm

Interviews: Tuesday 14 April 2026

Application Pack

Job Advert

Job Description and Person Specification

Please note, CVs are not accepted. For an informal conversation about the role, call Malwina Chrobakiewicz on 07305 041 135 or email malwina.chrobakiewicz@bsettlement.org.uk

Birmingham Settlement is committed to Equality of Opportunity and welcomes applications from all sections of the community. Registered charity number 517303

International Women’s Day – The Origins of Birmingham Settlement

Amy Cubberley — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:56:23 +0000

On this International Women’s Day, let us take you back to the origins of Birmingham Settlement!

Wardens, Students, and Maids, 1929.

Birmingham Settlement emerged from the Settlement movement, a reformist social movement that began in the 1880s and peaked around the 1920s in the United Kingdom and the United States, as the upper classes were becoming more aware of the contrast between their own wealth and the poverty of the working classes.

Its main object was the establishment of settlement houses in poor urban areas, in which volunteer middle-class “settlement workers” would live, hoping to share knowledge and culture with, and alleviate the poverty of, their low-income neighbours.

As a result, in 1884 Toynbee Hall in the East End of London was created. Fifteen years after the creation of Toynbee Hall, on 29^th September 1899, Birmingham Settlement was founded in Summer Lane, Newtown. Unlike other Settlements around the country, the committee was entirely made up of women, from president to treasurer, with the first male team member joining in 1913.

This was in many ways remarkable, challenging gender roles at a time where Victorian ideology emphasised that ‘a women’s place was in the home’ – many women were excluded from social, political, economic and legal spheres, limiting their ability to take action.

Birmingham Settlement was originally called Birmingham Women’s Settlement up until its name change in 1919 to what we are known as today, which better reflects the broad range of services on offer. The Settlement was initially set up to support women and children facing hardship in the Newtown community, through services such as Provident Collecting – allowing people to set aside a few pence per week.

For many in the community, this was their first real opportunity to save any money, and demand for the service was high, creating more opportunity for local people. Many people also found comfort in the home visits from their Provident Collector, enjoying having a weekly visit and a chat, and this service spanned for 55 years.

Another of the Settlements’ founding activities was providing immediate material and financial aid to older people in the community, with regular sums of money being paid to them from a pension fund. These early activities provided the basis for Birmingham Settlements’ work, now spanning over 120 years with a broad and accessible range of services on offer to our communities.

Opening day, 29th September 1899.

Early days at the Birmingham Women’s Settlement.

Community Voices: Co-designing Settlement Futures

Lizzie Forrester — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 13:01:22 +0000

Have you ever wondered how our community spaces might be designed for a future everyone wants to see? How civic infrastructure can truly serve all of us? And how wellbeing and connection can be strengthened through collective imagining of the spaces we share?

For the past three years, Birmingham Settlement has been involved in a participatory project with the University of Bristol’s ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures (CenSoF), working alongside local people to co-design futures that reflect community hopes and priorities.

Working with three community anchor organisations and building on community engagement at our Neighbourhood Futures Festival, researchers have been exploring what matters most to people in terms of connection – and especially with those whose voices are too often missing from these conversations.

What does this mean in practice?

In early 2025, the Birmingham Settlement Futures Group was formed, bringing together community members, Settlement staff and volunteers, and other local voices from Kingstanding and Ladywood. Together, they took part in a series of participatory workshops guided by CenSoF researchers.

Participants were invited to dream, imagine and explore future possibilities for Birmingham Settlement using creative approaches such as art, music, storytelling and interactive activities.

Instead of relying on abstract, technical language or formal consultation processes, engagement was rooted in people’s own ideas about the futures they want, explored in ways that felt meaningful, creative and inclusive.

Researchers created space for open conversation, shared imagination and practical expression, drawing on people’s lived experience, hopes for their families and knowledge of the neighbourhood.

In a series of sessions, participants designed posters and wrote newspaper front pages from the future, imagining the role the Settlement might play in years to come. These were later shared through an exhibition, opening up their ideas to a wider audience.

Future Soundings

In another session, a mobile phone app guided participants outdoors on a ‘walk into the future’, prompting them to write about the vision they wanted to see for Birmingham Settlement and Kingstanding.

The group then returned to the Sports and Community Centre, where a performer and a musician improvised a futuristic soundscape inspired by what participants had written, weaving their words together with ambient sounds and music.

You can listen to the finished composition on SoundCloud here.

Making Augmented Reality a reality

The group also experienced the Future Places Toolkit, an immersive approach to community planning using Augmented Reality (AR), a method that helps people to share their own visions about life in the years ahead.

During the workshop, the group were invited to re-imagine the Kingstanding Sports and Community Centre, and as they described their ideas, an artist translated their vision into live AR sketches.

Viewed on smartphones, these appeared as a digital layer over the site, enabling participants to see their imagined future brought to life in both real time and 3D.

Imagining Kingstanding in 2046

Through guided future-thinking and an immersive soundscape, participants were taken beyond a cold February day in 2026 and into Kingstanding in 2046. The group considered the built environment, nature and biodiversity, social relationships, services and recreation, neighbourhood wellbeing and inclusion to create a collective vision that included:

Community grow beds supporting a ‘green canteen’ food court.
A living wall, softening the architecture and supporting biodiversity.
An outdoor gym and a children’s adventure play area for physical activity and exploration.
An underground community swimming pool supporting health and wellbeing.
An additional storey to create more space for activities and face-to-face human connection.

The group also considered the role of technology, exploring how it might be used for good. They imagined sustainable systems for heating and cooling the building, and thoughtful ways digital tools could support inclusion and wellbeing.

Central to all designs was connection – creating spaces that encourage human interaction, meeting, sharing meals, socialising and being together.

The group were invited to consider the roadmap to the future vision and the mechanisms needed to get there, like developing new ownership models for long-term care and engagement with community spaces.

Looking ahead to 2046, the group placed connection at the heart of everything. As lives and technology continue to evolve, having welcoming places to gather and support one other, to feel belonging, to look after one another felt vital – to keep our shared spaces alive for generations to come.

Why this all matters

Too often, decisions about how technology is designed, used and governed are made without the people most affected by them. Often these are about predictions or plans from corporations or politicians. But those visions don’t always reflect the real hopes, concerns and everyday experiences of people in our communities.

By involving people whose voices are often neglected, this research explores methods for pluralising future visions and ensuring that planning is inclusive and meaningful.

For Birmingham Settlement, this project directly informs how we shape our spaces, programmes, and activities for the years ahead. It strengthens our commitment to co-designed by ensuring that service users, volunteers and local residents are not simply consulted, but actively involved in shaping the direction of the organisation.

The Futures group has encouraged people to think beyond immediate challenges and to see themselves as active contributors to the long-term future of their neighbourhood. It helps us ensure that our centre reflects the needs, hopes, and creativity of the people who use it – today and in the future.

We’re continuing our work with researchers in the Centre for Sociodigital Futures and other partners to engage with our communities and share what we’ve learned from this work – to help others see how community‑led futures conversations can influence better decisions, policies and services.

Donate

Take Action for Nature This March

Lizzie Forrester — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:31:33 +0000

Join Birmingham Settlement for a series of fun and FREE outdoor activities at the Nature & Wellbeing Centre next to Edgbaston Reservoir!

We’re pleased to be part of the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) Nature Call to Action Campaign, taking place across the West Midlands throughout March.

On Saturday 7th, 21st and Sunday 29th of March, the Nature and Wellbeing Centre will be open for a series of community eco days. Take part in bulb planting, make seed bombs, learn about composting, join our Nature Navigators walk, and explore our wildlife night cam and overnight moth trap! Book your ticket on Eventbrite here.

On Monday 23rd March we’re taking action for World Climate Day. Learn about renewable energy and rainwater harvesting, sow seeds, take part in a community clean up around the Reservoir and help make a greener future! Find out more here.

That’s not all! Children aged 2-5 and their carers can try a free Roots Forest School taster session on Monday 9th 16th, 23rd and 30th March. To register your interest complete the form here.

All events take place at Birmingham Settlement Nature & Wellbeing Centre, 79 Selwyn Road, Edgbaston Reservoir, B16 0SL. Questions? Email natureandwellbeing@bsettlement.org.uk

Money Advice at the Legacy Centre of Excellence

Lizzie Forrester — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 13:07:18 +0000

The Birmingham Settlement Money Advice team recently joined specialist organisations at the Legacy Centre of Excellence to speak to residents about a wide range of issues, from housing to benefits to support with utilities.

The event was part of an advice surgery with Labour MP and home secretary Shabana Mahmood.

If you would like to access support with benefits, debt or welfare you can find our qualified advisors in libraries across the city.

For more information on our free and confidential money advice service, visit our Money Advice page.