Growing to grow!

Who are Community Roots?

Community Roots is a Community Interest Company, meaning that community, both local and global, is at the heart of everything we do. We set up Community Roots in the dark winter days of 2021, sitting drinking steaming cups of tea and dreaming of growing delicious fruit and vegetables with our local community. This project was born from a shared certainty about a few things which we humans need to survive and thrive, namely healthy food, strong friendships and a flourishing natural world. And so we want to try and do things a bit differently, growing food in ways which benefit everyone; the people eating it, the people growing it, the plants and animals we share the land with and the whole planet (we like to aim high!).

We were lucky to be able to get started quickly with the offer of an acre of land from the amazing Mount Pleasant Eco Park in Porthtowan, and some generous donations of money and time (including from our oldest volunteer to date, Elaine Field, aged 92 at the time!). We've already made a great start, but to get ourselves properly ready for the next growing season we want to get all our infrastructure in place, so that come next spring we can be harvesting mounds of delicious fresh vegetables.

What are we fundraising for?

Here at Community Roots, we want to be able to grow beautiful, delicious and nutritious vegetables for our local community all year long. In order to grow right through the winter, and to be able to grow heat-loving crops like tomatoes, peppers and aubergines in our Cornish climate, we need to have polytunnels. So we’re fundraising to buy and erect a second polytunnel to double our indoor growing space (tomato forest here we come!). Growing like this is a climate-positive action, because it reduces the need for people to buy intensively grown vegetables that have to be shipped across continents. We want our polytunnels to last for years and years, and for the vegetables inside them to be given a nice peaceful life to allow them to fulfil their vegetable potential! So we are also fundraising to build a big old windbreak fence to keep everything proteced from our Cornish gales. 

Make your money go further

We have been lucky enough to have been selected to receive match funding as part of Cornwall Council’s Climate Challenge, so if we raise £1,000, they will match it, meaning we get twice as much as you donate! But there’s more too…we’re also in competition with other great projects for a further £1,500 of match funding on top of that, so if we can reach our fundraising goal quickly, we may be lucky enough to get a total of £2,500 to help us get growing. So please, donate what you can, and share our Crowdfunder with friends and family, the more we raise and the quicker we do it, the more likely we are to get the extra, much needed cash!

And finally…

We are all head over heels in love with this project, and we’d love you to join us! Please support us through this Crowdfunder, and then if you fancy it, come along, roll your sleeves up, and get involved (absolutely everyone welcome!). So far we're finding that the roots of friendships that we're growing in our community go at least as deep as the roots of the vegetables we're planting. (Plus we always have cake!).

Lots of love from Antonia, Fay, Manda, Matty and Nicky, and our growing band of amazing volunteers.

xxx