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We are changing our food system to address the climate crisis, food poverty, loneliness and biodiversity collapse
Community gardens can change the world!
We are on the edge of being able to achieve something really important and we need your help getting there.
A new, supportive council, an enormous community of trained volunteers and a committed core team are all the ingredients for a flagship local food movement in this country and borough.
But to make it real we need your financial support!
The food system is in crisis. ¼ of London’s schoolchildren face hunger during the summer holidays. 3.2 million adults in the UK reported not eating for a whole day because they couldn’t afford or access food. In the near future climate change (of which industrial agriculture contributes to by ⅓ of global CO2 emissions) threatens our supply chains, and global conflict and imperialism is impacting the cost of food now.
A Right to Grow is a way to put power back into people’s hands, to rebuild resilience into our communities, foster joy, connection and solidarity in the process.
Our plan is simple.
Over the next two years we will help create 10,000 square meters of extra food growing space in Waltham Forest (a fraction of the land available), to grow 120,000kg of organic fruit and veg to help middle and working class communities support themselves.
How can we do something so ambitious?
We are in a unique position. There is a renaissance in community urban agriculture happening in London - especially in Waltham Forest. We have hundreds of qualified horticulturists and community members desperate to grow more food. We have over a thousand people waiting for allotments, and countless more curious on growing for their community.
What’s happened so far?
Our first year has been a fight. Having raised nearly £4,000 from people who believed in us across the UK, but with very little commitment from the council, we achieved exactly what we said we would, and much more.
Most councillors we met were enormously supportive, but bureaucracy, inertia, and a lack of trust from a few key councillors blocked any meaningful progress. We had some small wins which we cherish. We helped start a process of getting Brooks Farm, an abandoned council site back into community use. We saved Donna’s Corner, a new garden, from being sold to developers. We forced the council to recommit to a food strategy.
But mostly we got our heads down and focussed on the relationships between people in our borough. We leafletted, door-knocked, phoned people, held public meetings and shoveled compost, and with a small team of 15 committed growers from gardens across the borough and a wider community of 400 residents keen to grow more food, we started 20 new small growing sites across the borough, and 8 much larger ones.
Now, after all that, the new council have committed to implementing a Right To Grow.
This is a thrilling time for us.
We have a serious foundation. We have the infrastructure, community groups, tools, dozens of trained horticulture experts, deep trust within the communities where we live and work, and now we have a local authority that backs us!
The conditions are ripe for something really exceptional to take off here. The training wheels are coming off and we want you to join us!
But to make it happen we need more money to pay for the basic materials for our new gardens, and to continue to pay our core staff of highly skilled and dedicated organisers.
The council has very few excess funds. But with some support from you; as well as us digging around looking for more grant funding to sustain the movement; and for partnerships that can help, we can keep building this movement.
Why do we need a better food system?
Our food supply chains are brittle. A 75% increase in the cost of fertilisers, putting the food system in a compromising position. We expect to see the true fallout from this towards the end of the year where prices could rise by 15-20%. Every metre we grow food locally, is fewer food we need to import and more available for places that need it.
We have found that our cities have huge untapped resources of nutrients, people and land. We can sustain the nation at lower costs and at better nutritional value.
Food growing is a way to simultaneously meet the challenges of food poverty, climate instability, loneliness, mental health and biodiversity loss.
Studies show for every £1 spent on community food growing saves the NHS £5. Food growing prevents flooding, captures carbon and creates vital habitat for wildlife.
More than that, food growing connects us to land and to one another. People develop a feeling of belonging to their home through stewarding the land, laying the foundations of an ethic of care, solidarity and mutual aid.
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 13th August 2026 at 8:14am