Raise match funding for the Growing Places project

Rachel McDonnell is organizing this fundraiser.

Donation protected

We are Rachel, Andy and Richard, and we are part of Walking the Land, a Stroud-based artists’ collective with its roots going back to 2003. You can find out more about us, and the things we have done, here . Recently we have successfully secured DEFRA funding from the Cotswold National Landscape (CNL) for our brilliant project, Growing Places - you can learn more about the project here .

The links between nature and well-being are widely recognised, as is the value for health of good food and the significance for everyone of creativity. Growing Places uses the arts to connect people with nature, landscape, food and farming, and so makes it more likely that in the future, participants will make choices which are better for nature.

Over the next nine months, Growing Places will run a number of activities to create this connection, and improve health and well-being. Walks, workshops, cooking, storytelling and artists’ residencies will engage school and community groups, food hubs, walkers, growers and the wider public. Among many other things, a gingerbread house in the woods will provide a home for resident artists and inspire workshop participants. An exhibition at Stroud’s Museum in the Park in February 2025 will show some of the artwork produced and launch a Directory of artists, community groups and land owners which will enable similar activity to continue beyond the duration of the project.

How the food we eat is produced is clearly connected with landscape, and Growing Places aims to enable people to explore this connection by immersing themselves in our natural surroundings. The project takes place on land managed by Growing Places partners: Stroud Community Agriculture, Oakbrook Community Farm, Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking and the Stroud Woodland Co-op.

In addition to the funding from the CNL, Walking the Land are looking for additional financial support specifically for:

Creating the Gingerbread House and some shelters in the woods to act as a focus and inspiration for community workshops
Providing a volunteer coordinator and expert arboriculturalist to facilitate volunteer tree planting and woodland regeneration
Funding Transport and materials for community workshops
Designing and Building a composting facility for Stroud Community Agriculture
Holding a festival, exhibition and workshops at the Museum in the Park to celebrate the project and tell people what we have learnt
Creating and distributing a directory to connect artists, community groups, schools and land managers who might want to collaborate into the future
Telling the story of our project to allow people to replicate what we have done

If we raise more than our target, we’ll put it towards more workshops - we’ve been overwhelmed by requests from community groups and schools to be a part of the project.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read about our project - we hope you love it as much as we do. If you are able to donate to sort our project’s amazing work, that would be brilliant. If not, please feel free to share with anyone you think might be interested.