New Brighton Community Gardens IKEA Growroom

Shelley from Casebrook

We believe that the gardens bridge gaps, reduce stress and foster social integration within the community. We welcome everybody and anybody from the youngest to the oldest to the gardens. We offer a friendly inclusive environment where people can come and go as they please involving themselves as much as they would like. While doing this they are receiving practical advice and education on growing food and becoming self sufficient. Our volunteers are able to take home, healthy organic vegetables from the gardens and any leftover vegetables are donated to the community fridge. We also run a 10 week school programme teaching youth sustainability, growing, and eating healthy.

We would use the grant money to make the IKEA Growroom, The design for The Growroom is an urban farm pavilion that looks into how cities can feed themselves through food producing architecture. Local food represents a serious alternative to the global food model. It reduces food miles, our pressure on the environment, and educates our children of where food actually comes from. The design for this lovely architecture has been provided free so that all around the world we can start producing local food of the highest quality that tastes better, is much more nutritional, fresh, organic and healthy and getting it into our communities.

The Growroom is designed for small spaces with it’s size 2,8 x 2,5 meter it has a small spatial footprint as you grow vertically. It is designed to support our everyday sense of well being by creating a small oasis or ‘pause’-architecture and enables people to connect with nature as we smell and taste the abundance of herbs and plants.

Our saying at the New Brighton Community is "Together we can grow" this would be a fantastic opportunity to build something that we can use to help feed, education and inspire our communities. We are hoping when people visit our beautiful Growroom they will feel inspired and many of these will start popping up around the city helping our community especially those struggling with the increasing food poverty.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, we are very excited about this project and we hope you vote for us. We have attached photos of our beautiful gardens and also pictures of what the growroom would look like.

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