New allotment for people with mental health issues

21.07.2010

Now that Summer has arrived, if you are treating yourself to any new gardening tools, Hightown Praetorian & Churches Housing Association (Hightown) would like to offer a home to your old ones.

Service users of Hightown’s mental health services in Buckinghamshire have been given an allotment in Great Kingshill and are keen to start growing their own fruit and vegetables. All they need are your cast off garden tools and any spare seedlings to get their allotment started.  By learning how to grow and cook food for themselves, involvement on the allotment will help people with mental health issues to develop their team skills, aid them to be more independent and introduce them to a new interest.

To get the allotment ready for use, Hightown’s Workskills team have already cleared and rotavated the land. Workskills is an employment project that undertakes gardening, decorating, removals and other maintenance work. It gives people with mental health issues the opportunity to work one day a week in a friendly and relaxed environment and receive therapeutic earnings from the income generated by the project.

Hightown is a well established provider of support to people with mental health issues and currently supports over 200 people in Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. It has an excellent reputation for providing support to people to live as independently as possible, both in the community and in its supported housing schemes. 

If you have any tools (however old) or seedlings you can spare, then please call Andy Curl on 01494 433788. 

For more information on Workskills - whether you have a task that they may undertake or if you are interested in joining - then please call Ray James on 01494 433788.

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