Growing Together 2025 is a national initiative led by Community Gardens Ireland (CGI), supported by Community Foundation Ireland, with facilitation by Community Garden Support. The project aims to strengthen the network of community growing groups across Ireland by improving coordination, data sharing, communication, and advocacy between emerging regional networks and CGI as the national body.

CGI, an all-voluntary organisation, has significantly influenced national policy and supported the rapid growth of local community garden networks in the last fifteen years. As these regional networks expand, the project seeks to clarify CGI’s national role and establish a shared vision for a well-functioning, connected, and well-supported community growing ecosystem.

The project engaged stakeholders from 12 counties through one-to-one interviews, an online session, and an in-person workshop. Participants included network leaders, coordinators, and practitioners actively supporting community gardens. Their contributions highlighted strong alignment in purpose—peer learning, shared training, local resilience, biodiversity action, and access to land—while also surfacing common challenges such as limited funding, inconsistent governance structures, communication overload, land access barriers, and the disconnect between policy ambitions and on-the-ground realities.

A collective visioning exercise imagined Ireland in 2050 with community gardens embedded in every community, supported by coordinated local and national structures, equitable access to public land, designated community growing roles, shared skills libraries, and integrated climate-nature-community funding streams. Examples already emerging across Ireland show early steps toward this future.

The workshop identified key strategic priorities: improving communication, enabling shared data collection, supporting inter-network collaboration, strengthening advocacy, and developing a long-term strategy for CGI. Participants co-designed concrete action plans around these themes, including:

• Audit the resources, tools, and talent already present in the networked system
• Creating a unified all-island map of community gardens
• Establishing quarterly coordination meetings between CGI and network leads
• Enhancing visibility and shared learning between networks
• Engaging universities to support data gathering on land use and participation
• Launching a coordinated advocacy campaign, supported by improved data collection
• Developing a fit-for-purpose multi-year strategy to position CGI for growth and sustainable funding.
  

CGI’s policy work to date has already yielded substantial results, including reinstatement of community growing provisions in national planning legislation, recognition in the National Horticulture Strategy, and significant advocacy within local authority planning and climate strategies. However, gaps remain in local engagement, land access, and consistent policy implementation across Ireland.

Growing Together 2025 concludes that CGI is well placed to act as a national coordinator and information hub, supporting a distributed network of strong regional groups. Implementing the agreed actions will build capacity, strengthen the networks, and accelerate progress toward climate-positive, biodiversity-rich, community-led growing spaces across the island.

Read the report here.

Thank you to our funders, Community Foundation Ireland, for making this work possible.