The Root To Resistance Continues
Ambitious 2023 Project Set To Continue into 2024
By Stafford Taylor
The ambitious project co-founded by myself, Stafford Taylor, and fellow gardener and social entrepreneur Lucy Platel is set to make a resurgence this year, 2024.
As some may remember, the Root To Resistance project was founded about this time one year ago, with the idea of empowering the most disadvantaged people in our society; the homeless. As an ex-homeless person myself, this is a topic I care about deeply. I wish to see negative and untrue stereotypes around homelessness rightly challenged and see that those suffering from homelessness are offered a means to better themselves. To me, the Root To Resistance was always primarily about bettering people, with gardening and DIY offering a means to do it. The idea was to show people that however small or oppressed society makes them feel they’re capable of making a positive difference and an impact on the world. The project also aimed to give homeless people an outlet as a distraction from their current struggles as well as an oasis of calm and learning.
Herne Bay In Bloom, a charity based around horticulture, community gardening and public space beautification, teamed up with Catching Lives, a marvellous charity offering various services to homeless people to renovate their own community garden space and develop the space for the homeless people using it. Both these charities helped me on a personal level and I was volunteering on behalf of the Herne Bay charity when the idea to renovate the Catching Lives garden came into my head, so after many hours talking things over with my colleague Lucy and meetings with the Catching Lives project manager, Miriam Ellis, our project was born.
Co-Founders Lucy Platel and Stafford Taylor.
Miriam and Lucy discuss the project.
We installed raised beds to provide the Catching Lives kitchen with food.
We laid new pathways.
We held a potting workshop.
We had arts and crafts days.
Considering our limited resources, time, labour and skills, we truly achieved a lot looking back. Reflection on the project offers a lesson in the power of the can-do mindset we so readily forget in the current era in favour of despair. Most if not all our problems in life have a solution, the key is in realising our own power to solve these, and this is the primary lesson I hoped to show people in everything we did in 2023.
Believe me when I say, we done a lot. We painted the parameter fences, used waste such as discarded pallet beds, guttering, and barrels as planters, cut the grass, levelled the ground, ran various educational, gardening and crafty workshops, built a table from waste wood, installed a lattice for berries, cut back and cleared weeds, planted various new plants including grapevines against the pagoda and a Japanese Acia, provided the kitchen with herbs and vegetables and gave clientele a chance engage via a direct democratic process and regular group meetings. We also had several excursions and contact with various other charities eager to support the Root To Resistance as well as being featured in articles and on various radio outlets. We finished the project with a BBQ and thank you party for all active people involved.
A trip to the Abbey Physic Garden and Faversham Men’s Shed.
Trip to the Herne Bay in Bloom Memorial Park Community Kitchen Garden, supported by various other local charities.
Lucy with some of our produce.
Our Future
The intensity of last year’s project is something myself and Lucy feel unable to match this year, so rather than continue gardening at the Catching Lives Community Garden we plan to move the Root To Resistance project over to our Herne Bay Memorial Park Community Garden: A project that in itself needs lots of volunteers and TLC. Talks between charities are underway and the hope is that a regular day will be set for those who would find our innovative social project beneficial. We at Herne Bay In Bloom could certainly use extra hands at the Herne Bay Community Garden and help from the homeless or former homeless like myself is as welcome as any help.
This year’s project aims include:
Providing transport from Catching Lives to Herne Bay and back.
Providing a set day and hours every week for the project to run.
Teaching gardening, DIY, ecology, social skills, and self-sustainability.
Expanding from empowering the homeless to empowering all people who need it.
Re-engaging the previous Root To Resistance volunteers.
Providing a free space with structure, to express, learn and create in.
Providing a free lunch along with warm and cold drinks to all involved.
Restarting direct democratic meetings to gauge community desire.
Re-engaging the Root To Resistance community WhatsApp group.
Engaging with media and promotional activities.
This is but a segment of what we wish to achieve, the broader goal, of course, is spreading the idea of empowerment, and the Resistance Mindset, which is about positivity and the power of a can-do attitude especially as it relates to the creation of free and inclusive community spaces to the broader collective of society.
We look forward to future adventures. Staf and Lucy.