ABOUT | Groundup Schools

'GROUND UP' is a Bucks School Community Garden Scheme that brings together sustainable food spaces, our passion for enabling and equipping young people with skills and understanding of what they need to grow food and its environmental impact.

'GROUND UP' supports schools that wish to either create a school garden or revitalise an existing one with links embedded in the community. The ultimate aim of this programme is to provide local people with the knowledge and skills to grow sustainable produce and the understanding of how healthy, sustainable food connects to health, the environment and a thriving community. To achieve this, we will provide material and curriculum resources, professional development for educators, garden check-ins (wherein we’ll support outdoor garden classrooms, community volunteer recruiting and training) and seasonal online support to sustain and expand educational gardens throughout Buckinghamshire.

Through designing, creating, piloting and forming the final scheme, we will generate best practice from informed experiences from experts, teachers, schools and the community, to build a scheme that can be shared across Buckinghamshire to help develop young minds around food production, food behaviour and our impact on the environment.

BACKGROUND

The scheme has road tested the following elements across five schools, each of which support slightly different catchments of young people:

Seasonal based planning workshops online - Each workshop is designed to build off previous workshops and include discussions and reflection groups, seasonal actions, inter-group sharing and activities to be used with young people and new resources. A two-way process with the experts and designers.
Initial visits and planning meeting and winter protection plans.
Regular check-ins with the experts, face time chats ‘in situ.’
On-the-spot support across the year, including progressive support visits on designing your space, with realistic ambitions.
Signposted local community volunteering possibilities and corporate days.
Links created lesson resources, activities and materials, for all levels of garden space.

Opportunities we will be looking at are pizza gardens and salad bars, tower gardens or full raised bed systems, composting areas and food waste systems. Covered areas like sheds, poly tunnels and green houses. Water collection systems and spaces to be used by 121 interventions.

Curriculum links to plant-based science, agricultural science, life skills, and healthy eating habits including cooking from fresh seasonal ingredients.

Ground Up Creators