In April 2011, greenspace scotland published “Community Growing in Scotland - Towards a framework for action”. This presented the findings of national research on the scale and range of community growing in Scotland.
The research led greenspace scotland to champion the development of the our growing community model to support communities in urban scotland to take a more holistic and strategic approach to community food growing.
In June 2014 our first pioneer growing community "Edible Twechar" launched its growing map and action plan. Find out more about Edible Twechar here.
Our Growing Community pack
The Our Growing Community pack has been developed to help Scottish communities to explore new places and more ways to grow their own fruit and vegetables. More and more people in Scotland want to grow their own fruit and vegetables, but land availability is a big challenge. There are many spaces and places where food could be grown in our villages, towns and cities – we need to think more creatively about where these are and how they could be used for growing food.
The information and materials in this pack will help you do this. Use the pack to get your community ‘growing everywhere’… on the edge of the school playing field, in the flowerbeds outside the office, on that bit of derelict ground.
The our growing community pack is available here
could your community be our next pioneer growing community?
We would like to encourage and support communities who want to explore and develop opportunities for food growing in their area to use the Our Growing Community Pack. We will work with/support them to use the toolkit to audit and map all the potential growing spaces in their area and to develop their own community growing vision and action plan.
We will work with each 'pioneer growing community' to help them secure funds to cover both the costs involved in greenspace scotland facilitating this work and to provide them with a resource which they can use to start to deliver their ideas and plans.
We would be very happy to meet up with you/members of your group to talk through this in more detail about how this could work in your area and to scope out interest in doing this with other members of your group/community. Contact Ea O'Neill for more information.