Communities improve their greenspaces to support more walking and wheeling

By GM Moving | 26 August 2025 | TAGS: "GM Walking", walking, Environment, Active environments, funding

To create this new fund, we allocated £10,000 of our investment from the Greater Manchester Integrated Care Partnership to focus on supporting small improvements to the walking and wheeling environment to help widen access and increase participation.  

Working in partnership with Greater Manchester Environment Trust’s Green Spaces Fund, we invited the groups they’d funded to apply for our Environmental Improvements Fund to adapt their spaces to encourage more walking and wheeling.  

This alignment to the Green Spaces Fund enabled the Walking and Wheeling Fund to add value to the original Green Spaces work, to further reduce inequalities of access to greenspaces and to support local people to get to and move around those spaces by walking and wheeling.   

Through our partnership with the Green Spaces Fund, we want to enhance the connection between greening, growing and movement for the benefit of our local communities.  

One of the organisations the fund supported was Ardwick Climate Action (ACA), who built accessible pathways for people to access their existing signage to learn about the walking routes between their local greenspaces. ACA also installed seating at their two community allotments to provide a place to rest for people walking between the sites. ACA is now working with various local groups, including a women’s group, a toddler group and a primary school to organise walks around the area.  

Gordon Flear from Ardwick Climate Action told us, “This work has made our greenspaces more accessible and inviting, and by organising walks to these locations, we’ve been able to highlight all the benefits of getting out and exercising in a way that’s appropriate for the groups we support” 

As part of the Environmental Improvements fund this year, we also funded three other organisations: 

• Friends of Chapel Street Park used the funding to install a ramp and rollable walkway in their community garden to enable people using wheelchairs and prams to use the space. 
• Manchester Urban Diggers used the funding to create accessible pathways and signage improvements at their community market garden in Whalley Range. 

• Station South used the funding to create and install signage to help people learn more about and navigate the facilities available in their urban garden at their cycle café.  

​Carole Pollard, Community Walking Lead at GM Moving said: “It’s been great to see the impact that the Environmental Improvements Fund has made this year. While the groups we funded had already done amazing work to improve their local areas through the Green Spaces Fund, it’s been inspiring to watch them use this additional funding to make further changes to encourage even more walking and wheeling to and around them”. 

If you’re a community organisation looking for funding to support more walking and wheeling in your local area, why not explore: 

• GM Walking and Wheeling Fund 

• Sport England Movement Fund