The Locavore Growing Project

Aim

Please support our inspiring community food growing project, bringing people together across the generations to share food and knowledge!

The Locavore Growing Project is a community food growing project which is mainly based at the Locavore Community Garden at Martello Primary School in Folkestone, Kent, with a nursery garden at Brampton Lodge Care Home. Our aim is to work find creative ways of sharing intergenerational knowledge and resources between the green spaces of Folkestone in order to address the urgent issues of food security and climate change.

As we ease out of lockdown, there will be so many ways to benefit from our beautiful garden spaces:

• Folkestone contains some of the UK's most deprived wards.  Some people within our community experience food insecurity as a daily reality (exacerbated by COVID19) and others have had no access to outdoor space during lockdown. The project enables the community to work to help one another, with food grown in the gardens being shared with those who need it and the gardens offering safe and relaxed outdoor space for families to enjoy and be close to nature. There is no pressure to get involved in gardening unless you want to.
• Our local care homes are repositories of extraordinary stories and knowledge, but they have been hard hit by the pandemic and many residents have hardly left their rooms in the last year.  We want to use our care home garden to host a unique forest school inspired intergenerational nature club to connect across generations.  Residents can join in or watch from their windows.  These sessions will be the inspiration for our community newspaper which will share knowledge and ideas from our spaces/activities out into the wider community.
• Gardening and the enjoyment of nature should be open to everyone, but for too long they have the preserve of the white middle classes.  Our Locavore Garden looks out to sea and the Port of Dover, so from our position at the gateway to Britain we are determined to be accessible to every part of the community.  We have already made our spaces wheelchair accessible and launched a weekly LGBTQIA+ gardening group.  We have a free forest school style group called "Wildlings" beginning in April for pre-school children (aimed at low-income families) to inspire little ones to have a curiosity for and love of nature and we are hosting a 'Village Fete' in the summer to bring our work out into the community.

All money raised in this crowdfunder will support these plans, but specifically will allow us to bring more people into the  Locavore Community Garden by: 

- building an accessible composting toilet (so that we can host COVID safe volunteer groups for local charities Touchbase and Beacon + who work with learning disabled young people)

- building an outdoor Pizza oven - built using sustainable cob techniques - to be used for community feasts when restrictions allow.  

- providing training for our staff and volunteers to support diverse users of the project

This project successfully funded on 23rd March 2021