We now have a window of opportunity at the Broadwater Farm Community Centre and at Lordship Recreation Ground to do something fantastic that could transform the lives of all of us living around here. We could turn the Harmony Gardens and the Farm Community Kitchen into a flourishing social enterprise, training, qualifying and employing local people as a key part of this local community and environmental regeneration project. Raising the funding needed for extra staffing and infrastructure, we aim to start running the B2E pilot projects full time at the Broadwater Farm Community Centre from September 2011.
A prize winner
From running these B2E Pilot Projects - and in response to consultation with our supporters, users, partners and surrounding local communities we updated and amended the current Back To Earth Business Plan. This was crucial in getting to the final stage of the Heritage Lottery Fund bid for capital projects in Lordship Rec, but needed amending in the harsh light of today's economic reality.
A prize winner
We are the main project bringing local people actively into the Park and Community Centre and involving them in their own community regeneration. We will be an increasingly self-supporting voluntary sector social enterprise with a contracted core group of full time and part-time staff and many committed volunteers and trainees. Informed by these 2008 - 11 Pilot Projects we will establish a permanent Farm Community Café, a weekly Food Co-op with a box/bag scheme and established community food growing and environmental conservation training as a social enterprise under the wing of the Back 2 Earth Charity. These will be managed with the help of Project Steering Groups with local community stakeholders and employing as many local people as possible.
Ruth's pruning workshop
From the outset we will be attractive and affordable enough to draw people in, so that they come regularly. We can then encourage people to reappraise their eating habits and their diets - and we will have time to establish an increasing number of food growing areas, sources of cheaper local food - and as a result many more healthier, fitter and better skilled local people.
Longer term, we will offer local people and Park users the best possible, tasty, fresh, "home-made", home grown, healthy, seasonal, sustaining and sustainable food, with ingredients as local and as organically sourced as possible, with as much as we can produced by ourselves in our own gardens. Everything has to be at the lowest possible prices for people on low incomes. Affordability is essential if we are to offer a truly effective service which is why we need grant subsidy initially while we establish a sustainable successful social enterprise that will make us increasingly self-sufficient.
