❤ LOVE LOCAL ❤
Sowing the seeds of hope
THIS INSPIRATIONAL ORGANISATION IS HELPING PEOPLE TO GET THEIR LIVES BACK ON TRACK…
T
he Severn Project produces some of the tastiest leaves you can get your hands on in the West Country, but the product is secondary to its primary goal. Steve Glover founded the Community Interest Company in 2010 as a means of providing education, training and employment for people battling ad- diction.
Having personal experience of addic- tion and consequently studying for a degree in addiction therapy, Steve noticed an absence of any vocational element to residential treatment, primarily due to a lack of funding. “I decided to set up an organisation that wasn’t dependent on funding that could address those issues,” Steve explains.
While the Severn Project wasn’t set up with the primary goal of growing food, it
is salad leaves that have got the project off the ground. What started with just £2,500 as capital is now picking £2,500 worth of salad leaves on a weekly basis, allowing them to help people get their lives back on track. “It was really diffi cult to begin with and now it is still diffi cult, on diff erent levels, but it is a sustainable business that provides really good quality food through- out the South West.” Volunteers on the project may have social needs and benefi t from being in an environment with people who have come through addiction. “What they need is somebody one step further up the ladder who can be saying, come on it’s ok up here,” says Steve. Participants move from being a volunteer that is not relied on to a volunteer that is relied on, at which point they are off ered a range of education and
“I believe that we are designed to grow food. Up until the Second World War, pretty much everybody did grow food. We’re not doing anything new and exciting really, we’re going back a few stages to something a bit more real.”
50 | THE WEST COUNTRY FOODLOVER
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