Teamwork planting for health and wellbeing

Aim

To engage our local community as we create a beautiful wildlife friendly garden and grow our own fruit, vegetables and herbs to share.

Established in 1982, Teamwork Trust supports adults with autism, learning disabilities and mental health issues giving all the same chances, choices and opportunities. We take pride in providing our service users with a safe, supportive environment where they can grow in confidence and become more independent. 

“I have lots of friends here, there is no other place like it” – CM

“Teamwork has changed my life. Prior to coming here I spent all day in my room.” – JM.

We have a gardening club and cookery club and have recently reached out to help a local retirement home  who wish to create a beautiful outdoor garden space that is good for wildlife and will encourage residents to spend time in their garden - the benefits of which are well documented. At present they just have grass, a few pots and a bird table. 

In addition we have a piece of waste ground at our Corby centre which we'd like to transform into a small kitchen garden to provide our cookery club fresh produce for our lunches. 

Our project therefore has 2 distinct elements to it that will help people aged 18 – 98 of varying abilities take positive action for nature, improve mental health and enable some community engagement between two groups who normally would have little contact with each other.

Part 1 of the project - raised beds to be planted with bee/butterfly friendly flowers at a local retirement home. 

Part 2 – raised beds for food and some flowers will be created at Teamwork’s Corby centre for nature and healthy food for our cookery club to prepare.

All beds will be made from recycled wood.

We are working in partnership with a local garden centre who have offered not only to advise on the best plants and care of our beds/planters but have offered to build for us bespoke planters/beds to suit the spaces we are working in. 

The money we raise from this crowd-funding is to purchase the wood to create the raised beds/planters (accessible for all) , gravel, soil, flowers, shrubs, fruit and vegetable seeds/plants, herbs and appropriate feed. In addition we will need some propagator tables to create a plant nursery for the kitchen garden and would also like to plant a couple of fruit trees (apple and pear) for which we would also need 2 x tree protectors until they are well established.

This project successfully funded on 7th November 2023