Leith Community Crops in Pots is a member of the Scottish Food Coalition.
Observations from our COVID-19 Community
Feeding Scheme
Background/Introduction
Leith Community Croft is a biodiverse, warm and welcoming food-growing and community-building hub, integrated
with our Croft Carbon College (very popular environment- and wellbeing-related educational project) and Minecroft
(our equally popular outdoor adventure/survival skills programme for youngsters).
In late March 2020, the Croft was gearing up for a spring relaunch and expansion of its ‘Hingabootery’ café and market garden operations, to offer quality volunteering/training opportunities to many while providing healthy, delicious and sustainable locally grown produce at the heart of Leith. The enhanced café/farm shop operation would have generated more income for our charity, taking us closer to financial self-sufficiency.
Our plans were derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdown. We could not run the café/market garden as social enterprises per se, but we were able to re-jig things to provide the priority services the community needed, and we received funding for what became our COVID-19 Community Feeding Scheme (and another Croft-based scheme offering free bikes and bike repairs to key workers).
As well as employees and freelancers, the feeding scheme involved over 70 volunteers who, over a period of three months during the COVID-19 lockdown, variously helped us grow, prepare and deliver healthy food (mainly by cargo bike), five days a week, to about the same number of recipients. The table contains some of the observations made by our employees and freelancers during the project (slightly edited), alongside our comments.
Linked below is the summary of key points.