Bolton Community Kitchen Allotment (BCKA)

Hub England & Wales

Number of people in group:

8

Active participants in last year:

20

The project started in 2021 with a massive programme of clearing and preparing a very overgrown and neglected site before rebuilding of beds, growing and work spaces could be put in place. The first real planting of the allotment started in 2022 with a very small team of services users and volunteers led by Gareth Bradbury. Sadly Gareth dies unexpectedly in December 2023 and the site lay fallow while BCK put out pleas for volunteers with gardening / allotmenteering experience. Six new volunteers put themselves forward for the task and became the core team who started restoring the site (again!) with the help and support of volunteers and one or two service users who were able to use this experience as a way of coming to terms with his death. We are in our first year, but have already made inroads.

Group started:

Initially around Summer 2021, but went into hiatus after the founder died in 2023. It had it's second and current iteration starting in March 2024

Paid roles?

No

Legal Structure:

Charity

How active is your group?

Very Active

Live Projects:

• Community Growing
• Other food projects
• Nature
• Community hub or activities
• Festivals, fairs or events
• Art / creativity
• Community visioning / imagination work
• Building local networks
• Local economy or new economy projects
• Wellbeing or Inner Transition
• Social Justice / Just Transition activities
• Youth or education projects
• Share, Repair or reuse

BCKA is the collective of volunteers brought together to meet one of the initial and overriding purposes of Bolton Community Kitchen; that is, the growong of  fresh, local fruit and vegetables using organic gardening principles of working within natural systems and cycles, using natural ways to promote a complete healthy, productive and sustainable growing environment.

The volunteers share the same ideology, work communally as a team,  pool our  horticultural and/or gardening knowledge and experiences of collective growing, allotmenteering and gardening along with our practicical, organisational and management skills to honour the founder, Gareth Bradbury’s dream of creating a space to grow food and provide a welcoming, calming, safe, nurturing, sociable, enjoyable communal and educational cultivation space for the for volunteers and service users of Bolton Community Kitchen, and the wider local community to come together to grow, learn new skills from each other and by hosting educational opportunities, develop and enrich social skills,  experience the emotional and healing benefits that being in a green and growing space provides, to raise awareness of the benefits of growing, taking a more organic and non-traditional approach to outdoor social spaces and the wonderful outdoors.

We will reach out to the wider local communities, schools and other voluntary sector organisations to create an inclusive environment where everyone can experience the well-being and healing properties that growing food in a communal and sociable, mutually educational space brings.