What is Growing Communities?

Growing Communities is a social enterprise run by local people in Hackney, East London. For the last 10 years or so we have been working to create a sustainable, resilient food system which can provide local people with real, practical alternatives to the damaging food system that currently exists.

We do this through community-led trade – in our case a box scheme and farmers' market – which harness the collective buying power of our community and direct it towards those farmers who are producing food in a sustainable way – allowing those small-scale farmers and producers whom we believe are the basis of a sustainable agriculture system to thrive.

We also grow some of our food on our urban market gardens in Hackney. The market gardens are organically certified sites by the Soil Assocation and we sell the produce we grow there through the box scheme.

In practical terms what we do is: we find farmers and growers (or they find us), we create an outlet to sell their produce (our box scheme and farmers’ market), we pay them what they need to produce and raise sustainable food, we put a mark-up on the produce or charge a stall fee so that we can generate income to pay ourselves too, then we work really hard to make sure our community buys that produce. We do all this without grants and generate all of our income ourselves.

As a social enterprise, any surplus we do make is re-invested in the organisation and not distributed to private shareholders. A voluntary management committee has overall responsibility for the organisation and it is voted in by members of Growing Communities at our AGM. We employ 20 part-time staff and have been financially self-sufficient since 2005.

This short film shows who we are and what we do. It does so in a different (but we think very powerful) way.

Currently we work with around 30 small local organic farmers and producers and supply food to over 3,000 people each week. We also run an urban growers apprentice scheme and are creating a Patchwork Farm in Hackney where trained apprentices grow food for the box scheme in back gardens, on church land and on estates. And we encourage, inspire and train people to grow their own food, while working to link this to the need to change the food system as a whole. We undertake all of this work and trade all of our food in line with Key Principles. >> Find out more about the importance of our key principles in our Manifesto for Feeding Cities