Transition Town Tooting

Tag: Klevis Kola

  • Young people’s garden project leads to Rooting in Tooting

    If you’ve walked past the Derinton Community Centre in Tooting recently, you may have noticed vibrant yellow planters bursting with colourful flowers, where rubbish used to reside, and young people sitting on bright benches doing their homework.

    Those young people, who attend the CARAS youth club on the site, worked with a team from Transition Town Tooting to build the planters and the benches and paint them over a number of weeks. They sowed seeds early on in the project and also chose plants that now grow there, during a visit to Share Community Garden

    The project came about after the youth club made a visit to Tooting Community Garden.  This led to the idea of the teenagers creating an urban garden on-site over eight weekly Saturday sessions.

    “Before this, I didn’t know how to plant and grow plants, but I learned how, and I enjoyed making the planter too”, said Waseem, one of the young people who transformed the space.

    CARAS (previously Klevis Kola) is a community based organisation working with refugees and asylum seekers.  The gardening project was developed with the young people, encouraging teamwork and communication, developing and practicing new skills and meeting new people in the wider community.

    Jenny Teasdale, who coordinated Transition Town Tooting’s involvement said,

    “Working with these young people over the last couple of months has been wonderful. Together, we imagined the possibilities of an urban garden, creating a mood board of ideas, and then we made some of those ideas a reality.

    Everyone planted seeds in the first few weeks and the kids tended them throughout, watching sunflowers, beans and salad leaves growing, ready to be planted out in the final weeks. With wooden materials from the community garden, the kids cut, assembled and painted planters and benches – making design decisions on the fly and developing new skills along the way. As a group, we decided what plants to grow and where to site what we built.

    I know I wasn’t the only person sad to see the project come to an end, having enjoyed every second of the process. At the same time, we are all really happy to see the transformation in just two short months.”

    CARAS Youth Coordinator, Molly Abraham spoke about the project,

    “The gardening project with TTT has been a fantastic opportunity for young people who attend CARAS to gain skills, share knowledge and create something we are all extremely proud of.  It’s been amazing to watch the group grow in confidence as they became proficient with drills, saws and secateurs, and to relax into sharing stories of growing in their home countries.  Working with the wonderful team from TTT has been a real pleasure for all of us and we are excited to be able to develop the work, and the friendships, over the coming year.”

    “We painted the pallet planter and the yellow planter, and I sowed flowers and beans. They’re still growing”, said Hafso, shown here painting.

    Spurred on by the development of the space and the enthusiasm of the youth group, we are delighted to announce that CARAS and Transition Town Tooting are now working in partnership with the RHS over the next year, running monthly sessions with the youth club and adults at CARAS.

    The new project is called Rooting in Tooting, and is part of the RHS’s Greening Grey Britain scheme. We’ll be developing more flourishing, attractive growing ideas that will transform the site.  This practical, experiential project is just one of the ways CARAS is helping newly-arrived people to integrate into the vibrant community of Tooting.

    Chris Young from the RHS led a session with the youth group last Saturday:

    “I was very excited to make my first practical visit to the CARAS youth club, and had a great afternoon working with the youth club members and volunteers. We started by talking about our project to grow plants in various spaces surrounding the centre and then looked at propagating some herbs that could be used later on.
     
    I gave a quick demonstration of how to take cuttings from the plants I’d brought and then everyone got stuck in and had a go.We finished up by extracting seeds from dry seed heads and sorting them into origami seed packets we’d made earlier.

    Everybody was incredibly helpful, enthusiastic and welcoming. I was also impressed that some of the young people knew the plants I brought and told me about how and where they grow in their home countries.Fingers crossed that the cuttings root!
     
    Looking forward to my next visit for the community fun day on Saturday where we’ll set up stand for the project .”

    We’ll be promoting the new project at the CARAS Family Fun Day on Saturday, 22nd August.

  • WHY ‘A Wild Afternoon in Tooting’? Part 2

    This is the second in our mini-series of 3 blogs about ‘why’ experiencing the urban outdoors can be valuable and significant for many people….something we’ll enjoy on Sunday (see the events listing opposite) in an informal way, based on fun and games.

    This blog is just a snapshot of a big subject, looking at another way for young people to experience the outdoors: participating in structured or formal programmes aimed at a very wide range of needs and using many methods. 

    One formal programme that happens right here in Wandsworth is The Challenge National Citizenship Scheme for 15-17 year olds. Read all about it at http://www.ncsthechallenge.org/ 
    There is still time to sign up for 2015!
    Tooting Community Garden has been involved with The Challenge for the past two years, providing practical experience of a community project, in our case in the outdoors.

    The 2013 group tackled our bread wheat – threshing, sifting and then grinding into flour to be baked into Foodival sourdough. It was an active day full of energy!

    The 2014 group had a damp day moving from “Am I expected to actually touch this earth..?” to “Wow, digging potatoes is like finding buried treasure” and putting their photos on Instagram.



    That group’s feedback was expressed tangibly when they donated over £30 to the Garden – cash they had raised in another part of their course and could have easily spent on themselves. We’re grateful –  much appreciated! 

    The Youth Club run by the Klevis Kola Foundation is another local programme. Details here: http://www.kleviskola.org/projects.php
    Alongside Club activities for young people in the asylum seeking and refugee community, a group of teenagers spent a few concentrated hours in the garden in January.  

    With english as the common language (we had five more to spare)…

    …we replanted the living willow yurt, a good wintertime job, and also tied in cut sycamore branches to bend over and define the future shape of the willow structure…so that it can come alive in our imaginations even if it will take a little while to get there

    While it was great to tick off an longstanding Garden job, the problem-solving and interchange between the young men was also rewarding. And that sense of shared achievement was extended to chatting while making tea in the volcano kettle, and sharing Steph’s cake.

    A longer-term structured outdoor programme (based in Brighton):
    Young substance abusers experiencing Forest School activities right in their neighbourhood
     Quoting a project leader:
    “Young people have come to a woodland site on a weekly basis for 10 weeks, and engaged in a whole range of activities based around a campfire setting. 
    The activities have included: fire lighting skills and fire management, using edged tools to make items from natural materials – wood, fibres – and cooking over the fire.

    The strength of the programme lay in the setting, which was, on the surface, very informal. The youngsters would essentially be joining in with the staff, who happened to be in the wood and engaged in activities themselves. There was freedom to choose to do other things, sit around the fire and chat, or make up their own ideas for things to do.”

    Some outcomes?

    • The focus on the the place and the activities on offer and not on ‘self improvement’ or the addressing of ‘issues’ allowed the young people some emotional room to become self-managing, and to make the relationships they needed in a neutral environment.
    • Each young person had their own personal sense of achievement and this was sensitively recognised and encouraged by the trainers.

    If you would like to read the full case study of this Forest School project, click here. Please contact us if you would like to read the wider research project with another ten case studies.

    Thanks for reading: the possibilities for engaging local young people with the urban outdoors are very diverse, the benefits are well known, and there is creative experience to share. Informal or formal, there is a green thread in exploring how powerful the outdoors can be, and it’s useful to get that conversation going locally. 

    See you Sunday for a very informal trial run!
    – Charles