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Craigmillar Community Grows - green activities for everyone

Investment project code: 31

Estimated Price

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Description

This project would have several aspects to it. We would:

 

Work with primary school children to introduce them to gardening, ideas around greening, the environment and net zero. Whilst teaching basic skills we would also tie this into curriculum areas including maths and basic biology (reproduction of plants/ how seeds grow/lifecycle of a plant etc).

 

Continue our cook club, engaging with vulnerable members of society, alongside the community, encouraging integration whilst teaching cooking from scratch. This clearly reduces waste, helps to lower our carbon footprint and starts to encourage good habits such as composting. It also introduces concepts such as batch cooking and safe freezing. The cook club is also a key place for the development of volunteers. We have a number of people, particularly from the BAME community who started off attending the group who now take on leadership roles because they were able to start volunteering with the group. They now act as role models for others in the community, showing what can be achieved in a relatively short period of time.

 

Re-establish our walking group with people with disabilities, some of whom are in wheelchairs, walking / wheeling on accessible routes and ending up at a café for a brew and a blether. This would encourage socialisation and break down social isolation as well as giving much needed exercise in a healthy environment which improves mental and physical health. It would also give the opportunity to discuss the environmental issues we’d seen en-route – plants, birds etc and learn more about their habitats and backgrounds. This is in partnership with Places for People’s Daycare service.

 

Continue our community walking group which engages with a wide range of people, including people referred by Community Link Workers with diagnosed mental health conditions, people who are socially isolated and ordinary members of the community. All are encouraged to get out and discover new green spaces on their doorstep, and also do other activities such as foraging or developing home-made maps of the area as they go.

 

Support our Men’s Shed group as they work together, supporting each other, and recycling and reclaiming old wood and other materials. This includes things like pallets, floorboards and building materials from building sites locally. They then turn them into items such as garden planters, raised beds and bird boxes which local people and organisations want. This part of the project is extremely environmentally friendly as it engages isolated men in recycling/upcycling, preventing a huge amount of waste and also encouraging local people to garden and to buy planters and bird boxes locally, thus cutting their carbon footprint.

 

Run more seed workshops to continue our seed library which has just been established. Based at Craigmillar Library, this project supports local people to save seeds, store them in our bespoke library drawers in specially made envelopes, and then in the spring, come and take seeds from the library and plant them. There will be a mapping exercise showing where seeds from the library have been planted.

 

Location: EH16 4DW

Proposed on behalf of: We work with local people, running cooking groups, walking, gardening and environmental art. These groups are based on consultation with the community so are what local people tell us are needed. We then fundraise to meet the running costs of the activities in order to make them accessible to everyone in the community. Our activities are open to everyone and we advertise locally and through social media. We find that word of mouth is also powerful in terms of getting new people along. However we also target vulnerable groups for our activities, e.g. we invite people with disabilities with their carers to our cook club; work with ESOL groups so they feel they have a safe space and then join other groups; take referrals from GPs/Community Link Workers for people with mental health issues who need to get out and about.

• Build relationships between neighbourhoods
• Reduce greenhouse gas emissions