Growing Communities start-up programme

Do you want to bring more locally and sustainably produced food to your community?

Do you want to find out how to make your communities’ food more resilient in the face of climate change and peak oil?

This website is for individuals and communities who want to build practical, community-led alternatives to the current damaging food system. We can help you.

Stop press - the deadline for Expressions of Interest in joining the Start-up Programme is June 18th. Even if you have missed this deadline, please do sign up to our mailing list to receive news and details of future rounds of our start-up programme.

Growing Communities is a social enterprise run by local people in Hackney, East London. We’ve run our community-led box scheme for over 10 years and we now pack almost 1000 bags of fruit and vegetables a week, most of which comes direct from local, sustainable farms and some of which we grow ourselves.

We started back in 1993 with three friends (who each found 10 people), one farm, no money and a lot enthusiasm. 

We’ve learnt a lot along the way and we now want to help more communities round the UK to set up their own community-led box schemes, as we believe they are a practical mechanism for changing the food system. 

That’s why we launched our start-up programme in 2009 and have been developing the materials, training and web-tools with which to help groups set up community-led box scheme using the Growing Communties Model . 

It’s early days yet and there is still a lot more for us all to learn, but we are now looking for up to 5 groups to work with in 2010.  If you think you might be up for this then read on…

>> This website will introduce you to the Growing Communities start-up programme, tell you more about us and show you how to get involved.