Introducing The Positivity Project
by Rebecca Hughes | Sep 21, 2026 | Stories
There is no shortage of difficult news right now. Most of what finds its way onto our screens is conflict, crisis, or cause for concern; and while that matters, it is not the whole picture of what people are doing in the world.
The Positivity Project is a new content channel from the Crowdfunder team. It exists to tell the other stories: the projects, the people, and the communities using crowdfunding to build something better. Not as a counterargument to the difficult stuff, but as a reminder of what is actually happening out there when people decide to act.
The first episode is out now.
Episode 1: The rainforests hiding in Britain
The Land Where Plankton Eat Trees (you’re on it)
Most people don’t know that Britain has temperate rainforests. They exist! Pockets of ancient, moss-draped woodland in the wet western fringes of the country can be found in Wales, Scotland, and parts of England, and they are among the rarest ecosystems on earth. Less than 1% of the world’s land surface supports temperate rainforest. Britain once held a significant share of it. Most of it is gone.
Carl is an arborist turned conservationist and co-founder of Plant One. He and his team have been working to protect and restore what remains and, increasingly, to create more of it, inspired by a conservation model from Japan.
The concept is the fish forest. In Japan, conservationists discovered that healthy broadleaf forests along riverbanks directly feed the marine ecosystems downstream. Leaf litter breaks down in rivers, carries nutrients to the sea, and supports fish populations that in turn support the coastal communities that depend on them. The connection between the trees on the hill and the fish in the sea turns out to be measurable, significant, and something you can act on.
Plant One has been using Crowdfunder to fund their work on exactly this, planting trees in the right places, with the right species, to create those connections in Britain’s own landscapes. Their most recent campaigns have focused on establishing the conditions for fish forests in the UK: finding the remaining pockets of temperate rainforest, protecting them, and extending them outward into the surrounding land.
Plant One Cornwall are close to raising £100,000 on Crowdfunder to fund the reforestation of Cornwall, the most deforested county in the UK, with match funding from Save Our Wild Isles, Cornwall Council’s Climate and Nature Fund, and Aviva. The money went toward paying the team fair wages, bridging gaps between planting costs and grant funding, and acquiring land to open up to the public.
Tom and Oscar from our team visited Carl and the Plant One project for the first episode of The Positivity Project. The resulting film is quiet, careful, and worth ten minutes of your time.
Support Plant One on Crowdfunder →
What The Positivity Project is for
In 2026, we’re not short of notifications about the latest unsettling news and negative content on the internet. This channel can hopefully be a space that people feel genuinely hopeful to engage with.”
That’s the intention. Each episode will document a project from the Crowdfunder platform; the people behind it, what they’re building, and what made it possible. Some will be environmental projects like Plant One. Others will be community spaces, arts organisations, sports clubs, social enterprises, and campaigns. The common thread is that they exist because a group of people decided to fund them together.
For project owners, it’s a chance to tell their story properly, not in a campaign page description, but in a film. For anyone who has an idea about something they’d like to create, it’s a window into what crowdfunding actually looks like in practice, and what becomes possible when a community gets behind something.
New episodes will follow. Subscribe to the channel to catch them as they land.