Manchester Urban Diggers CIC
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Mission Statement
MUD (Manchester Urban Diggers CIC) is a social enterprise, working to create food system change and empower communities. Improving our Food Sovereignty is the overarching theme of everything we do. We are determined to promote & develop disused urban areas as a small but important part of the means of production. We do this through creating grassroots, people-led farming projects across Greater Manchester where we can grow food to share or to sell. Our working model provides three main benefits: improving the environment, improving personal wellbeing, and strengthening communities, achieved through the universal right to grow, cook and eat food.
About This Cause
Our objectives summarised are; Start a food system change in Manchester by promoting food sovereignty & developing food production sites on disused urban plots of land thereby decreasing the cities carbon footprint and increasing biodiversity of the areas we work within Improve the mental & physical wellbeing of the local residents through creating beautiful spaces together - giving people an opportunity to exercise, upskill themselves, socialise with their community, volunteer & give back and be mindful in their surroundings. Reignite communities around the gardens we create through beautiful spaces and good food. Encouraging local residents and community groups to use the spaces and interact with the people around them - improving community cohesion and decreasing loneliness. We aim each garden to be the centre of thriving & bustling communities. Our Work & Our Impact We are working towards a fairer, greener and more sustainable food system for Greater Manchester. To this end, we turn underused land into community spaces, places where people can come together to grow, prepare and eat food grown using low impact regenerative farming methods. Our main site is a former bowling green in Fallowfield, South Manchester: Platt Fields Market Garden (PFMG). PFMG is a member of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) network. On this site we’ve produced over 900kg of food on just ½ an acre of land in 2021, in addition to improving the soil health, air quality and biodiversity of the area and - central to our aims - providing over 3000 hours of health and wellbeing provision in the form of Green Prescribing in 2021. At PFMG, we work with the community by hosting volunteer days & where we provide free cooked food, facilitate & organise free events, fundraise / promote local community groups, we offer a space to hire, we work with local businesses - it is both a community hub and a working market garden. We know our work positively impacts our communities. We conducted a survey of our volunteers and project participants in December 2021: of 27 respondents, 98% said their mental wellbeing had improved as a result of volunteering with MUD. Activities Our organisation’s activities centre around engaging local communities with food sovereignty through community-led gardening projects. We do this though garden design projects and consultation, garden build projects, creating opportunities for volunteering, and delivering wellbeing programmes with partner organisations. Whilst we rely on grant funding to run wellbeing and volunteering programmes, we also generate a significant amount of our income through trading - in 2020/21 this was 60% of our income. Our trading activities cover Garden Design and Build services, contracts to deliver NHS Green Prescribing programmes, our markets, our cafe and our events and venue hire offer. We also organise community events and host events in partnership with other organisations and businesses, some of which we charge entry for to cover costs and raise funds for ourselves and for other organisations, such as Eat Well. Events in the past have included food and drink festivals, craft workshops including pottery, life drawing classes, fermentation workshops and more. These events are vital in generating interest in the work we do, as well as providing additional income streams to support our work. Projects We’ve worked on a number of gardening projects with groups facing particular challenges, including: Young people within the justice system (working in partnership with Remedi UK and Youth Justice Manchester) Long-term unemployed people (through our Winter into Spring programme) Young men experiencing anxiety, low mood and symptoms associated with Seasonal Affective Disorder (our Dig Yourself Out project) Faith Groups, with the aim of bringing people from different faiths and backgrounds together (Near Neighbours) The Kurdish communities in the immediate area around Platt Fields Park (Bahary Kurdi) People experiencing social isolation as a result of the impacts of Covid-19 (One Manchester Gardening Club)