Last week Martin Hare, our Managing Director, paid a visit to Together NI, one of the Live Here Love Here Community Grants Schemes we currently support. Together NI, based in East Belfast provides community outreach services to people in financial hardship by offering benefits advice, providing food parcels, and helping combat social isolation though a range of community programmes including parent and toddler clubs and a new programme of Growers Club Workshops. The aim is to support people impacted through reduced contact with society, promote community food growing, and improve the wellbeing, mental health and use of outdoor local spaces.
Together NI will use the funding provided by McAdam to create a community growing space to grow fresh produce which can help supplement the tinned and dried food in food parcels and address some of the health issues associated with poor diet and food poverty through provision of additional nutrition and greater variation of food. The new space will be used by the ‘Growers Club’ programme for workshops which offer both nutritional and horticultural learning, provides seed packs to help the community grow at home in any space, and provide a safe, inclusive space to learn and socialise for those who are socially isolated.
Martin, pictured with Christina Henderson from Together NI and Helen Tomb from Live Here Love Here said of the project “Clearly this project will support community togetherness and act as an enabler for this charity in supporting the more vulnerable members of our society. This will provide some useful life skills, help address some of the impacts of food poverty and improve the well-being of those involved. We are delighted to support this project which is one of 10 similar local community projects McAdam support in NI through our partners Live Here Love Here.”
