Community Garden Club

The Community Garden Club is a non-profit organisation that helps communities come together to create green spaces that residents can enjoy every day. It provides the public, schools, councils and local businesses with a unique opportunity to connect with each other to find new ways of turning underused spaces around them into local neighbourhood gardens and create green spaces that the whole community can contribute to and enjoy.

Challenge

Create service propositions that can help city planners engage with the community, reconnect people with nature and help them organise and take ownership of the development and maintenance of their public spaces through social innovation. This was an RCA Service Design Project in partnership with EU Interreg, Enfield Council and Kent County Council.

What is it?

This project was done in the context of Sittingbourne high street where the Kent Flood and Water Management team have commissioned the early design work for an urban regeneration project centred on the use of natural flood prevention solutions. The goal of the project was to:

Help residents manage water better to prevent flooding
Improve biodiversity
Increase public and business awareness of the flooding issue
Create an urban landscape of higher community value

The Community Garden club provides the public, schools, councils and local businesses with a way to connect with each other to find new ways of bringing more gardens into their local neighbourhoods.

The Community Garden Club is a community-led network that collaborates to create green spaces that the whole community can contribute to and enjoy. It provides a platform for people to connect with each other and share resources, knowledge and even green spaces and gardens.

Who is it for?

By connecting everyone’s needs and opportunities a space for new, valuable relationships opens up where stakeholders can collaborate to share resources, knowledge and even green spaces and gardens to bring true value to their local communities.

Why is it needed?

The main barriers preventing residents from establishing gardens in underused spaces in their local area were:

Insufficient skills or time to look after a garden
Local businesses need to step in to run local initiatives because councils have limited funds available for small scale local initiatives
Relations between the local community and the council are strained
School staff and children feel like a nuisance if they spend time in public parks and spaces nearby
It’s difficult for local people to accessing funding for grass-roots initiatives
Setting up and maintaining a garden is a full-time commitment

The main barriers preventing the Local Authority from supporting residents in establishing gardens in underused spaces in their local area were:

Engaging schools is very difficult
They want to provide better support for community programs but lack funding
Solutions needs to be self sustaining

How does it help?

The Community Garden Club helps residents develop a closer connection with nature by giving them the opportunity to experience nature in the places that are closest to them and to rethink how they use the private and public spaces around them.

It’s a service that leverages the space, skills and resources available through local businesses and the council and gives residents an opportunity to take ownership of and improve their neighbourhoods together.