Help Growing Forward Grow Forward

Hello, my name is Cath and I am helping some friends raise money to keep their wonderful allotment open. Please read and donate to this amazing project. I know the fantastic work they do and it would be devastating to see it go.

Who are we?

We are the remnants of a small mental health gardening project, Growing Forward, who are determined to retain the land we have worked on. Now we need your help to continue.

Growing Forward was a Nottingham based CIC that supported people with mental health problems to access nature. Based at Windmill Community Gardens, we had our own little plot that we nurtured. Like many mental health projects - the constant scrabbling about for money became too much and the charity had to close. It is the second such project for people with mental health problems in Nottingham that has shut down in the past year.

Going forward from Growing Forward, a small group of us are meeting to continue to nurture our space and explore how we can continue using a peer led, peer support model. This crowd funder forms stage one of our plan to continue.

What’s the plan?

Stage one: Raise enough money through this crowd funder to enable us to continue meeting. Our main current cost is paying someone to be on site with us who fulfils the insurance requirements for Windmill Community Gardens. This person will also facilitate the work we need to do to go from the group we are now to becoming the group we want to be - a peer support group where we support each other to access nature, where we make our own decisions together, and where we have the power to define who we are. During this time we will form a constituted group.

Stage two: Once we are a constituted group we will apply for funding to build on stage one. We will continue to meet both to nurture the space and to explore who we want to be and how we want to be as a peer support project. It is likely we will become a co-operative during stage two. We will make decisions on the values we want to guide us and translate this into working practice regarding how people access the space, and the ways in which we support each other and make decisions about the space.

Stage three: Once we are clear about who we are and how we work, we will apply for a bigger pot of funding. This will enable us to operate over a sustained time period, putting into practice everything we have learned from the beautiful project who no one would fund, and the decisions we have made as a consequence of its closure.

How can you help?

In order to keep meeting we need money to pay Windmill Community Gardens staff to be on site with us.

We need a few garden supplies to get us through this growing season.

We also need refreshments for our meetings.

Some of us need help to travel to Windmill Community Gardens.

£10 will cover refreshments for our group for one session.

£30 will cover travel expenses to enable us to meet.

£100 will buy us all the seeds, compost and other related garden supplies we need for the coming year.

£130 will cover the cost of one week of meeting and working together on site.

£520 will fund all our costs and activities for four weeks.

What will my donation do?

You’ll be supporting community led green space, a project shaped by us, for us, and one that we want to grow.

You’ll be supporting mental health peer support, an invaluable resource we really can’t live without.

You’ll be helping a group of very marginalised people, abandoned by most ‘helping’ institutions and services, to take ownership of our own healing and wellbeing.

You’ll be supporting our learning as we take on the responsibility of running our own group, training in (eg) first aid so we don’t need supervision from Windmill staff.

Thank you so much for reading, supporting and sharing. Please support this project and share as widely as you possibly can. It means everything.