Growing public awareness of accessible gardening with BBC’s Mark Lane
Leonard Cheshire is an international charity supporting disabled people to live, learn and work as independently as they choose. For more than 70 years, it has worked to remove barriers across education, employment, healthcare and community life.
The charity’s work reaches disabled people across the UK and internationally, combining direct support with campaigns for a more inclusive society. Leonard Cheshire worked with We Do Stories across multiple campaigns to help share that work with wider audiences and strengthen engagement around disability inclusion.
Leonard Cheshire wanted to increase awareness of its work and build stronger engagement with its campaigns.
The charity needed a campaign to bring its work to life for wider audiences and to show how its programmes support disabled people in everyday life.
One of the key focuses was the Can Do programme, which supported disabled people in taking part in community activities, building confidence and developing new skills. Leonard Cheshire wanted to raise the programme’s profile while encouraging a broader conversation about accessibility.
One campaign centred on accessible gardening. The aim was to show how gardening could support health, wellbeing and independence when spaces, tools and advice were designed with disabled people in mind.
We used a story-centric approach to help Leonard Cheshire connect its wider message about inclusion with practical, everyday experiences.
For the accessible gardening campaign, we worked with Leonard Cheshire and BBC Gardeners’ World presenter and landscape designer Mark Lane to create content that combined expert advice with the charity’s message around health, wellbeing and accessible community activities.
We shaped the campaign around National Garden Scheme Week, giving Leonard Cheshire a relevant moment to reach audiences already thinking about gardening, outdoor spaces and wellbeing.
The campaign needed to speak to several audiences at once: Leonard Cheshire’s existing supporters, gardening audiences reached through Mark Lane and The National Garden Scheme, and media interested in accessible outdoor spaces.
By planning the campaign around audience, timing and partner channels, we helped Leonard Cheshire give the Can Do programme a stronger public platform.
The campaign helped Leonard Cheshire reach wider audiences and generate positive conversation around accessibility in gardening.
Content was shared across multiple partner and owned media channels, extending the campaign beyond Leonard Cheshire’s existing audience. The activity attracted interest from regional and sector media, helping raise the profile of the Can Do programme and the wider conversation around accessible outdoor spaces.
The campaign encouraged disabled gardeners to share their own experiences. This gave the work greater public value, turning campaign engagement into a broader conversation about access, participation and inclusion.
Leonard Cheshire worked with We Do Stories across multiple campaigns for four years. That continued partnership reflected the charity’s confidence in our ability to handle sensitive stories with care, shape campaign material for different audiences and support communications that strengthen public understanding of disability inclusion.
The work helped Leonard Cheshire show its impact through people’s experiences, not just programme activity. It provided the charity campaign with assets, media angles, and digital content to support public engagement across different moments and platforms.
