How to get it ALL funded ???
September 18th, 2008
Andrew Smith from Physical Regeneration & Development in Newham Council kindly coordinated this meeting at Nina Pope’s studio in Hackney with Nick Ely from Newham Parks who have control of the Abbey Gardens site, Sharon Swift from the Landscape architect from Newham Council, Ceri Lewis from Modus Operandi Arts consultant and Dasha French from the Friends Group.
One, maybe less obvious affect the arts commision had so far is to regularly bring key agents together at one table to drive the process forward. The arts commission from day one (before any artist had been appointed) provided a platform for the different departments within Newham, the friends group as well as English Heritage to sit at one table and talk productively about the development of the site.
This has off course been aided by Nina and Karen’s holistic proposal which not only proposes how the garden should look but also provides a strategy on how the different communities can participate in the garden. It proposes a physical, management and community structure. For the latter the phasing of the proposal is crucial and has been subject of some debate in regards to funding. Regeneration in many ways focuses on the delivery of hardware often without clear and innovative strategies for social sustainability. For this a process based approach is key and the cutting garden – which hopefully gets off the ground very soon – is the first step to the final garden. it will allow us to get a wider community of gardeners directly involved and grow the network of participants slowly. At the same time it can become a testing ground on how to structure a participatory approach to the development which sees active involvement of the participants in the shaping of the garden as well as bringing in experts where needed. The overall feeling is that we (the friends group) do not want to be supplied with a garden but receive support in shaping it, with the Friends Group being one of the key authors. This has also been the motivation to initiate the arts commission and luckily Nina and Karen’s proposal very much supports and facilitates this.
Finally, one more note of clarification. The community garden has never been envisaged to be an allotment. In yhe garden and the growing of food will be an important feature and should help to form a strong community at the same time we always hoped the garden will have a strong educational element. In some respects similar to Roots and Shoots in Lambeth
At the moment the key is to get started and also to raise funds for the cutting garden. Since we started the project we always had a lot of interest and many people are keen to get going. However we never were in a position to actually say – Here is your bit of garden lets go … It is therefore crucial that we raise the needed funds quickly. At the same time we are keen to get our hands dirty and get digging. Which hopefully we can and will do on a small scale while waiting to see how successful the funding applications are.
It was good to hear from Nick Ely that time put in by volunteers can count towards match funding. Every hour that is spend working for the garden should be recorded and on paper is paid at a fixed rate. The money is off course never paid out but is recognised as a monetory contribution when applying for funding. (hope that makes sense). Nick appropriately labelled it Sweat Economy.