The Community Farm was started by local people responding to a local need for nutritious, locally grown produce and a desire for increased social connection. Community-oriented agricultural projects like ours have the power, not only to grow food, but also to create strong social links in their local area. Links that change lives by providing face-to-face social contact whilst filling bellies with healthy, organic food.
Encouraging people onto The Farm is one of our core aims and we’re proud to have become a real hub of local activity, bringing people together for education, work and play in an environment that is inclusive, welcoming and supportive. As we’ve grown, so have the numbers of volunteers, and we now welcome more than 1,500 people onto The Farm every year.
People come here for many reasons. As well as our volunteering programme, local school visits and nature inspired activities (such as owl prowls, bee counts and bat walks), we also run wellbeing courses provided by Ecowild and our own weekly therapeutic horticulture course, Grow and Make, and our nature connection course, Wild Steps.
In 2020 we also launched the COVID Fund to help those disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Thanks to your generous donations, we managed to reach over £10,000 in the first year of fundraising! All of those funds went back into our Community. You can read more about how the money was spent on our COVID Fund webpage.
