The story of We Grow
Just like many great community-born projects, We Grow grew in a totally organic way. A family who owned a piece of land offered to share it with other local people, to grow their food together.
Everyone who joined had busy lives with work and school, but on workdays they’d chuck on their wellies and come together for a few hours looking after the land, growing food, eating together and hanging out by the fire afterwards.
Over a few years more and more people in the area asked if they could get some help to do the same and create community on their land. Growing groups were brought together and community swaps started happening.
Eventually a CIC was formed by some of the women in the growing groups and lots of larger growing projects were created on council land, outside community venues, in town centres and on farms. We Grow now trains Community Leaders to carry on the work of teaching growing skills and connecting people with land to create networks in other areas around the South East.
The We Grow team is made up of people with all sorts of skills including community development, self-development, teaching, horticulture, permaculture, biodynamic gardening, market garden production, garden design, medical herbalism, mushroom production and chicken care.
We support groups to develop strong, positive relationships with each other and the local network they’re part of. A healthy community is as important as healthy food.
We Grow is a community interest company which means it is non-profit and any excess funds legally have to be put back in to community projects. Some hours for some of the team are paid if we’re working on funded projects, but many more hours are put in voluntarily.
