Dr Rachel Bragg receives OBE

News item first posted on: 15/06/21

Social Farms & Gardens is delighted to announce that Care Farming Development Manager Dr Rachel Bragg has been awarded an OBE in the Queen's birthday honours for services to academia and Green Care - congratulations Rachel!

Rachel has been a driving force in the development of the care farming sector in the UK for the last 15 years and is a passionate advocate of green care – ‘nature-based treatment interventions for people with a defined need’. Rachel and the SF&G team, in partnership with Thrive, are delivering the Growing Care Farming project (part of the Government’s Children and Nature Programme), which aims to transform the scale of the care farming sector in England and provides supporting services to the 300 care farms in the UK..

Rachel also remains a Visiting Fellow in the Green Exercise Research Team at the University of Essex, where she was a senior researcher for 17 years, with research interests including the relationship between nature, human health and mental wellbeing, specifically ‘green exercise’ and ‘green care’; care farming; walking and wilderness therapy; and sustainable agriculture.  Rachel is well known for her Participatory Appraisal and Action Research training; questionnaire and fieldwork design; she is considered an expert in the evaluation of nature-based green care interventions; and is also research advisor for other charities.

On receiving the news Rachel said: “I am feeling very proud and delighted to have received an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to academia and Green Care – it’s great to get recognition for our inspiring care farming sector & for the amazing work to transform people’s lives – nature is more important than ever for our mental health, and we’ll need all the opportunities we can get to help people feel better post Covid”

Find out more about Rachel's work developing care farming at www.farmgarden/GCF, and her academic work at https://www.essex.ac.uk/research-projects/green-exercise.

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