UK: Five garden crowdfunding projects to back this spring

Natalia Jenger, Louisa Winning and friends founded Bottle of Ginger as a way to change the local soft drinks culture, growing ingredients and manufacturing their own drinks. Photograph: Bottle of Ginger

Crowdfunding is certainly becoming an alternative way of getting difficult-to-fund but important projects off the ground.

By Jane Perrone
The Guardian
Mar 24, 2017

Excerpt:

Gardening at Yarl’s Wood (target: £5,000)
What is it? A social and therapeutic gardening project for the women at Yarl’s Wood. The prohect would convert the current uninspiring gardens at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire into places for female immigration detainees to sow, plant, weed and dig.

Who’s behind it? Emma Dagless set up Thyme to Grow community interest company in January last year. She has been been a Yarl’s Wood Befriender for two and a half years, and has a career background in plant science, horticulture and project management.

Why give? “Gardening will provide an opportunity for women to experience many of the feelings that detention denies them; purpose and meaning; planning, decision making, problem solving and creativity; responsibility, ownership, self-expression and achievement,” Dagless says.

Read the complete article here.