Making Community Food Growing Part of Every Town and City

The Big Dig

Making community food growing part of every town and city

The Big Dig – what it’s all about

The Big Dig is a national project all about making urban food growing a part of every urban landscape. There are already hundreds of food growing gardens in cities and towns across England, and the aim of the Big Dig is to help those gardens get more people involved in their work. The project currently has six city partners who are aiming to get 10,000 new people involved in their local food garden over the next year.

One of 116 gardens that recently opened for Edible Gardens Open Day

We want the work with these six cities and more to act as a catalyst to turn every town and city into a hub of food growing activity. We know that there are great community food growing gardens around the country and we want to engage them in the Big Dig, create a noise about the many health, social and environmental benefits of growing food together and help get more people involved.

But now we need your help to get groups in your area that are growing food to sign up to the Big Dig.

Over the course of the programme, The Big Dig will be holding national events through which we will promote all the gardens registered with the project and use the activities that will be happening during these national events as a way of raising the profile of urban food growing with the public, press and decision makers.

Incredible Edible Prestwick get ready for some digging on Edible Gardens Open Day

Our first national event, Edible Open Gardens, was held across our six city partners in September 2012. One hundred and sixteen food growing gardens took part and they held a range of activities from walking/cycling tours of edible gardens, community picnics and cooking and sharing food grown on the sites.

Why community food growing?

Sustain already has experience in building a thriving food growing hub in London. Over the last four years we have created almost 2,000 new growing gardens as part of the Capital Growth project. 80% of these are in the most deprived areas of London and they have engaged people of all ages and from diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds.

Page 1 of 5

Getting the whole family involved in Brighton

We have seen food growing bringing together neighbours who have never spoken to each other, given children the chance to learn about food growing through our schools programme and provided CSR opportunities for businesses wanting to put something back into their local community.

Page 1 of 5

Page 1 of 5

What the Big Dig can do for you

Our next big event will be the biggest ever community food growing volunteering day – The Big Dig - in March 2013. This will be our main volunteering recruitment day when we will be aiming to get hundreds of people down to their local growing site and get involved in getting it ready for the new growing season.

In order to enable spaces to get the maximum possible benefit from this day, we will have an interactive map on our website which will list all the spaces involved, what work they plan to do on the day and how many volunteers they need. Prospective volunteers will be able to search for their local space and sign up to take part.

In addition to the interactive map, there will be a range of benefits and resources that the Big Dig will provide for its partners to help them get the most out of the day.

Below is the map that we used to promote Edible Gardens Open Day in September 2012:

Materials we can provide for a Town or City

·  1,000 The Big Dig branded postcards

·  10m length of The Big Dig branded bunting – 1 per site (upto a max of 10)

·  500 The Big Dig stickers

·  The Big Dig A4 Wallets – 1 per site (plus 5 extra for publicising the campaign to decision makers, other organisations)

·  1 visit from a growing advisor (or 5 x 30mins telephone advice)

·  Discounts of over 30pct on the rrp for all products from Compost Direct

·  1 prize selected from a range of Compost Direct products to be given to one space within the town/city for an outstanding contribution to The Big Dig

·  A selection of seeds

·  Ability for all spaces to sign up to the national database for The Big Dig. Volunteers will be able to sign up to help at their local site through the website.

·  Training sessions around land issues, growing, and managing volunteers

·  Sustain will work to promote the Big Dig through the media to raise the profile of food growing spaces across the country and encourage people to get involved

What we would want from you?

·  To collect details of the number of new and first time volunteers that come to your sites.

·  To get some local press/publicity for The Big Dig event

·  To promote The Big Dig to local schools and businesses

·  To register a minimum of 3 gardens within your town or city to The Big Dig and create 100 volunteering opportunities

·  To create materials to publicise The Big Dig at the gardens and in the media

Page 1 of 5

There will be a further national event – Edible Open Gardens – in September 2013 which will showcase the best in community food growing across all the urban areas registered with the Big Dig. In 2012, 116 gardens took part and we received extensive coverage in television, radio and written media.

Page 1 of 5

Relaxing in the community orchard, Brighton

What next?

Between now and Christmas, we will be aiming to identify those towns and cities that want to be involved in the Big Dig. If you have community food growing gardens in your area and you can help sign them up for the Big Dig then please get in touch.

NB: The Big Dig project only has a finite amount of resources and we will be allocating this on a first come first served basis so get in touch early to get the most benefit!

Page 1 of 5