Events and activities

The Mersey Basin Campaign was always looking for new ways to involve our partners and engage our stakeholders, as well as to reach out to local people living near our watercourses.

By the time the organisation closed its doors in March 2010, the region’s annual calendar was studded with a whole range of regular events and activities initiated by the Campaign.

There were the Northwest Business Environment Awards for a start, a starstudded celebration at which the region’s business community was rewarded for excellence in environmental management and performance.

Mersey Basin Week was our annual festival of clean ups, crafts and conservation, when thousands of people got involved with practical activities on the watercourses of the Mersey and Ribble basins. Hundreds of community groups, businesses, local authorities, volunteers and individuals hosted events – anything from a litter pick to a full-scale regatta.

The Unilever Dragonfly Awards were always a favourite at the Campaign, as they gave us the chance to shout about some of the Northwest’s finest environmental volunteers. In our final year, we had a great time looking back at all our past winners before the judges finally decided to present Tom Workman of Liverpool Sailing Club with the special Dragonfly Champion of Champions award.

Our sub-regional gatherings, the Mersey Estuary Forum, Cheshire Waters Forum, Manchester Waters Forum and Ribble Forum, were important features of the year. These events gave people a chance to focus on their local water environment. The most popular feature was always the Soapbox Sessions, when anyone could sign up to raise an issue, promote a project or have a rant about something they were passionate about.

And behind the scenes, the Campaign’s communications team worked tirelessly to publish twenty issues of SourceNW magazine. A mix of in-depth features, news, interviews and environmental ephemera, the publication was read by more than 15,000 people across the Northwest.

This collection showcases specially prepared case studies of some of our key annual events and activities. The case studies are a practical guide to how we got things done, so whether you’re working on similar projects, wondering how to get started, or simply looking back nostalgically at the Campaign’s work, we hope you’ll find something here that helps.

To see more case studies of our local action projects, have a look at the Local heroes collection.