In 2021 and 2022, Community Gardens Ireland and Social Farms & Gardens Northern Ireland worked together on a project funded by the Community Foundation of Ireland. The project, called Growing Resilience Across Ireland (or GRÁ Ireland), helped to encourage a closer working relationship, encouraging the sharing of knowledge between the two organisations and increased networking between gardens north and south of our shared island. Some details of this project are included here:

In March 2022 we held an online gathering with communities north and south sharing their ideas and experiences of community growing.

In May 2022, Social Farms & Gardens Northern Ireland organised a visit of community growing projects in the Belfast area, including visiting Cloughmills, Grow at Waterworks Community Garden and the Belfast Alleyway Gardens!

In August 2022, members of the Rainbow Alley community garden in East Belfast visited Mud Island Community Garden. The two communities shared ideas and their experiences over lunch and tea. We hope it was the first of many visits!

Maeve Foreman, CGI and Patricia Wallace, Social Farms and Gardens Northern Ireland attended the All-Island Convening on 27 and 28^th September 2022 to mark the first year of the 30 civil society partnerships funded by the Community Foundation for Ireland and the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland’s All Island Fund.

In November 2022, Community Gardens Ireland organised a tour of some Carlow community gardens & spaces for growers north and south.

Throughout 2022, we commissioned some videos of some community gardens across Ireland. We always say that every community garden or allotment has their own personality, and one thing we wanted to try to do was capture part of this.

The GRÁ Ireland videos are detailed here: https://www.youtube.com/@GraIreland-ov1nh?app

In November 2022, Community Gardens Ireland & Social Farms & Gardens Northern Ireland issued a joint press release following our in-person gathering in Carlow. Both organisations called for more spaces to be allocated for more allotments & community gardens, along with calling for growing your own food to be recognised by politicians and governments as a climate adaptation action.

Along with publicity in newspapers, Marc Ó Cathasaigh TD highlighted our work and put our call for call for growing your own food to be recognised as a climate action on the Dáil record:

Marc Ó Cathasaigh TD on X: “Both @CommunityGrdns and @giyireland have emphasised the potential for community growing to act as a climate adaptation and resilience measure, a view echoed by @IPCC_CH. While small community actions can seem like a drop in the ocean, remember the ocean is made up of drops…. https://t.co/md2kdLN0Ql” / X

In addition, Community Gardens Ireland and Social Farms and Gardens Northern Ireland jointly signed the Centre for Cross Border Studies’ New Common Charter for cooperation –

(https://crossborder.ie/what-we-do/projects/common-charter/)

At the end of 2022, Community Gardens Ireland and Social Farms & Gardens Northern Ireland both agreed that the work completed in 2022 on this project was incredibly worthwhile and that organisations and communities have benefitted from this north and south. We have continued this close working relations in the years since.

A huge thanks to Community Foundation for Ireland who helped us grow as organisations through their support of this project.

For any questions on this project, please contact info@cgireland.org