Dinosaur! The Kensington Neighbourhood House will establish community gardens in the industrial areas of Kensington.

As a lead organisation of the Kensington Community Network, we are committed to delivering on the key focus areas of the Network’s Action Plan. Key focus area 1 is to “Facilitate access to fresh, affordable and nutritious food”.

This is a pilot to show how community organisations, private business owners and local residents can come together to contribute to food security. We have done the initial consultation along with soil testing and the next step is to start the hard labour in February next year. We have approached a private owner of a strip of shops in the industrial area in Arden street Kensington who is keen to work with us and allow us to cultivate his green spaces to grow food and establish a worm farm. The tenants there are also very excited about the project. We have been working with Vincent Care, who work with elderly disadvantage people in the area, and we will be encouraging their participants to join in as members. They have already been doing some voluntary gardening and many are keen to be involved in this new project. We’d also like to run some workshops for our members around composting, soil cultivation, seed saving etc.

We see this as a wonderful way to involve local business owners, their tenants and employees in local food security projects as well as creating a link with some of our most disadvantaged elderly residents who have gardening skills and wisdom and are looking for opportunities to be involved in the community. We can all be learning from each other. Our intention is to evaluate the project and to document a replicable model.