Higher Ground Allendale

We provide purposeful and productive work and volunteering experience in a market garden environment, helping people overcome their barriers to employment.

We do this by supporting people to build on their personal wellbeing and resilience. Our gardeners learn new skills through working as part of a team, supported by an RHS qualified gardener and a qualified careers advisor.

We offer a safe, calm and welcoming environment for our gardeners to benefit from outdoor activity and peer support with supervision. Our volunteers, including referrals, work together to maintain the garden and help grow vegetables that are sold to the community in a box scheme. All money raised from the sale of produce goes back into running of the project.

We have a vegetable garden, a public space and a wildflower nursery that, with the help of our volunteers, propagates and sells native wildflowers to be planted by local people in their gardens and verges. We also engage with the community to run craft and skills workshops, an after-school club, seasonal events and weekly drop-in sessions to tackle social isolation and raise money for our core costs.