Today (3 December) is #GivingTuesday – a day for charities, businesses and individuals all around the world to shine a spotlight on all of the good things they’re doing and hopefully encourage others to get involved.
This year, Blyth Star is getting involved with #GivingTuesday to help shine a light on the amazing work taking place on the site of our day service at Stakeford Nurseries to convert a piece of derelict land into a learning centre and training garden for our service users.
The creation of the learning centre will help us to deliver a more well-rounded teaching experience to our service users. The dedicated indoor space, especially during the winter months, will prove invaluable to enable us to engage service users in the theoretical elements of horticulture, supplementing their practical learning out in the Nurseries’ training gardens and polytunnels.
On the land surrounding the centre, our vision is to create a landscaped space featuring hedged walkways, herb and flower gardens to encourage local wildlife and mixed height raised beds and planting areas suitable for our clients who have mobility needs which will transform the derelict land into a practical space which can be used for learning and wellness activities.
Having hit the halfway point towards our fundraising goal back in July thanks to a generous £40,000 grant from The Jill and Norman Franklin Trust, we have made great progress with the project so far. The learning centre building itself has been constructed and we are now focusing our efforts through our first ever public campaign to raise funds towards the creation of the training garden, as well as the technologies that we need for within the centre to provide new ways of teaching our NOCN-endorsed course of in-house horticultural training.
Julie Dixon, Chief Executive Officer at Blyth Star Enterprises, commented:
“Over the years, we have been incredibly fortunate at Blyth Star to find ourselves in a position where we haven’t been dependent on grants in order to survive. Instead, our philanthropic activities have always been focused on larger scale capital projects where we are looking to make improvements to our services which will benefit the individuals in our care.
“The barren land project is no exception to this and we are incredibly grateful to all of our benefactors who have helped us get to this point, but we still have a way to go to get to the finish line.
“As the cost of living crisis continues, large grant-making organisations are finding their resources increasingly stretched, which is making it harder for charities to access the funding they really need and as such, is pushing them to think outside the box when it comes to fundraising. A public-facing campaign is not something we have ever done before, but we thought, as it’s nearly Christmas, we’d give it a go.”
If you would like to get involved by making a donation, you can do so via our JustGiving campaign: https://www.justgiving.com/campaign/blythstarecocentre
This Christmas, give the gift of learning.
