Community gardening was the topic for two speakers at the latest meeting of Christchurch Rotary Club.
Such schemes have become popular as a way of improving physical and mental health, as well as helping with food security.
Angela Gray, operations co-ordinator at the Grounded Community charity, outlined the objectives and development of the organisation.
It was established in 2020 out of a church community project, The Secret Garden, which had been created in 2012 to grow food on an area of unused land behind St Clements Church in Boscombe.
Over the years the emphasis had broadened to encourage people to grow their own food, often in community groups.
By 2022, the charity’s core team had grown to nine part-time staff and 140 volunteers, with funds totalling £400,000 from the National Lottery and various local funding groups.
This enables them to run six projects over four sites, and to partner with two local Community Interest Companies.
The charity’s mission is to educate, share and grow, so as to reconnect members of the community with nature, with food, and with each other by building an abundant circular food system with a culture of storing, re-using and re-distributing food surplus, she said.
Working with local housing associations, they have installed large numbers of raised beds in residents’ gardens, and have worked with local schools to develop their school gardens and green spaces in line with the RHS gardening curriculum.
One of the Community Interest Companies is Your Planet Doctors, a CIC created in 2021 by Dr Anne Hayden, MBE, a recently-retired Dorset GP, who spoke next.
Anne said she founded the CIC to help address the problems of food insecurity and mental health problems by encouraging communities to grow their own food together in sustainable ways.
Other projects, often in conjunction with other local organisations, involved teaching people to grow and swap different crops, and to participate in schemes that enable them to exchange vegetables for other food items.
The aim now is to extend this work more widely, and thus to help build mutually supportive communities enjoying better health and assurance of affordable nutritious food.
Moving the vote of thanks, Mike Wood congratulated the speakers on very instructive presentations about truly valuable community initiatives and welcomed the inclusion of work in local schools, as the children would be able to take the message home, and so get more people to take part in the various projects.
Leave a Reply