Thanks to funding from Cardiff Council’s Direct Food Support Grant Programme 2023/24, and with support from C3SC and The National Lottery Community Fund, our project ‘Seeds of Hope’ will help vulnerable people in Cardiff who are experiencing, or who are at risk of, food poverty.
This funding will help us to expand our current seasonal food production to a year round programme with our new funded polytunnel. The project will be connecting vulnerable people to nature and wellbeing, growing food, learning cookery skills, increasing awareness of healthy eating, low cost cooking, sharing cookery skills and food stories, and bringing people together through the creative, growing and cooking processes.
Over the last year we have been developing our outdoor and nature connection work at our Leckwith Droves allotment site in Cardiff, enabling us to bring our service users and participants into connection with the healing benefits of nature, with the aim of growing vegetables and fruit, enjoying fresh air, and improving health and wellbeing.
This project will be working in partnership with referred service users and volunteers from vulnerable communities, providing them with volunteering opportunities and distributing fresh food. Our beneficiaries will include Ukranian and other refugees, people with mental and physical health issues including diabetes and eating disorders and young people on probation. We also have collaborative arrangements in place for food distribution with existing food bank providers – including South Riverside Community Development Centre and the charity Boomerang in Cardiff.
Our project meets all five of the Cardiff Good Food Strategy 2021-24 goals in that we are expanding a service that empowers a healthy and sustainable food movement, contributes to the local food economy, is environmentally sustainable and engages with many community groups. In relation to the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act, our approach addresses prevention through engagement with vulnerable groups, we are in collaborative partnerships with community organisations, and we seek to integrate our goals through food production, wellbeing and volunteering opportunities, resulting in a sustainable resource.
