Professional

The Food Garden Project, managed by RehabCare and the Simon Community in Dundalk, is developing a community garden. Its aim is to support very marginalised and vulnerable individuals to grow, prepare and cook a range of healthy organic fruit and vegetables throughout the year. There is an emphasis on transferring these skills to their home life. A support worker and a cookery instructor will be employed to help the participants learn how to grow produce and prepare healthy meals using the food harvested from their community garden. A small, dedicated on-site venue where education programmes can be facilitated will also be acquired, together with the gardening equipment, fruit plants and seeds.

The target group are people with an intellectual disability, mental health issues and resettled homeless people, from RehabCare and the Simon Community. The participants are aged between 30 and 60 years, and all have an interest in horticulture. Many have a dual diagnosis, i.e. learning difficulties and mental health issues. There is also an emphasis on transferring these skills to their home life. 

The Food Garden Project will employ a part-time support worker to help individuals to develop the community garden and a cookery instructor to support and help educate participants on using the produce from the garden.  
 
Objectives of the project include:

To pilot an innovative shared learning project where two marginalised groups of people work together to produce low cost healthy food products that suits their budget 
To equip participants with the skills to prepare and cook nutritional meals using the food products harvested from the garden
To provide participants with a good understanding of food safety guidelines and education on nutritionally balanced diets through using their self-produced high quality foods
To transfer gardening and cooking skills to the participants’ home life
To promote community integration by supporting the participants to sell excess food products to the local community by setting up a stall in the local farmers market. Revenue from the sale of products will be reinvested in the Food Garden
To provide a therapeutic stress free environment that will promote positive mental health as many of the participants in the project have suffered from mental illness, brain injury and social disadvantage.

About the partners

The Food Garden Project is a joint project between RehabCare Dundalk and the Simon Community Dundalk.

The ethos of RehabCare and Simon Community is to promote personal development and independence for people from marginalised groupings namely people with a disability and people who are homeless or recently settled.  A lack of awareness of healthy eating has been found while working with these target groups.  It is well established that unhealthy eating patterns can lead to a high incidence of diabetes, obesity, high cholesterol, some cancers and high blood pressure. 

The Food Garden Project is unique in that the group is bringing these two community groups together to work towards enhancing the participants’ understanding of nutrition and self-sufficiency through growing fruit and vegetables and developing cookery skills.

Find out more about the funded community food initiatives

East Belfast Healthy Eating Education Programme (Belfast) | Food Focus Community Food Initiative (Cork) | Food for Life (Derry)  | Footprints Women’s Centre Building a Transition Community (Belfast) | KASI Community Garden (Killarney)  | Limerick Seed to Plate Project (Limerick)