We’ve been awarded National Lottery funding!
We are thrilled to announce that we have been awarded £130,000 in National Lottery funding to support our work with our local community through volunteering opportunities at the garden.
The Lottery funding will be used to set up and run Learning to Grow, a new thee-year programme, which sits alongside our mentoring programme, Over the Garden Gate.
Learning to Grow will see us develop our plant propagation activities with volunteers. As part of this programme, Helmsley Walled Garden will create new employment opportunities through two avenues:
By increasing our core staff, we will be able to support more volunteers to propagate plants, as well as being able to provide more garden volunteer opportunities, where there is currently a waiting list.
“One of the areas I am most excited about, is being able to support volunteers looking for future employment in horticulture and keen to learn more about plant propagation.” says June Tainsh, Executive Director. “Now, thanks to the funding from the National Community Lottery Fund, we will be able to offer a 12-month part-time traineeship each year, enabling a transition into paid employment. This will make a huge impact on those volunteers who are able to work but have found barriers to entering the workplace for a range of reasons.”
The new funding is from The National Lottery Community Fund, which distributes money raised by National Lottery players for good causes. It is the largest community funder in the UK and will be distributed to Helmsley Walled Garden annually, over the course of three years. The programme is set to start in the early Spring 2024.
The National Lottery Community Fund recently launched its new strategy, ‘It starts with community’, which will underpin its efforts to distribute at least £4 billion of National.
Lottery funding by 2030. As part of this, the funder has four key missions, which are to support communities to come together, be environmentally sustainable, help children and young people thrive, and enable people to live healthier lives. National Lottery players raise over £30 million a week for good causes across the UK. Thanks to them, last year The National Lottery Community Fund was able to distribute over half a billion pounds (£615.4 million) of life-changing funding to communities.
