Thank you. Thanks. Adrian. Our next speaker is Chris Walsh from the Kindling Trust. And Chris is going to talk to us about their work at Woodbank Community Farm and food growing there in Stockport. Thanks, Chris. Oh. Oh, put a timer on. That's it. Yeah. So my talk is going to be the complete opposite to Charlie Baker's. Hopefully is going to be calm and slow and I'm just going to share with you some some photos of Woodbank Community Food Hub. Um, for those of you who don't know it, I'll introduce it to you. And hopefully, uh, this is an invitation for you to come and see us. It's the old council nursery in, uh Woodbank Park in Offerton and us as an organisation, have been there for the last seven or eight years or so. Um, it's a fantastic site. And as an organisation, we were super keen to take on that space and look at what we could do as a we call. It is basically a food hub, so it doesn't matter about your food aspirations, your food ambitions, your food abilities. You can come to our site and you can learn about food in whatever way you want. So we're not prescriptive about what sustainable food is, what the sustainable diet is. But we kind of all know that we need to kind of go on this journey, which is kind of less meat, less dairy, kind of more wildlife friendly farming. Um, fair trade, those sorts of things so you can come onto our site and learn cooking skills and come and join us for volunteering to grow food. You can come and learn to be a commercial grower. You can buy veg. It's just a whole range of things, really. Um, and the site is just fantastic opportunity to kind of experiment and be honest about what we get right and what we get wrong. But also look at what we can do in terms of this thing called urban agriculture, and the site is relatively unique within Greater Manchester, and it's unfortunately quite a rare sight. It was the old council nursery, um, so there were lots of glass houses and poly tunnels and a nice big fence around it, and infrastructure and irrigation and water, and, like those kind of sites, are quite rare in the region. so we kind of have as an organisation. We have quite a responsibility to kind of show what we can do and also explain and share those limitations. Kindling Trust is a pretty small organisation is about a dozen of us. Uh, we describe ourselves as a food sovereignty group, and for us, that's about kind of taking some control over our food choices and a food system. Um, if you go on our website, you'll see a whole range of projects. And ultimately what we're trying to do is address challenges along the supply chain. So on the one hand, you've got farmers who you might think of them as driving around Cheshire in Range Rovers. Most of them are living in poverty. Uh, most of them a tenant farmers and they're not being paid well for food they produce or they're making more money in producing foods that aren't necessarily healthy for us. And then, on the other hand, you've got loads of people living in food poverty. People can't afford food people who don't have access to the resources to cook and aren't terribly confident about, you know, their food choices. So what we're trying to as an organisation is do two things. We're trying to make sustainable food as accessible, and by that we've been affordable as possible. So we're trying to get food from our farmers. Two consumers and customers our beneficiaries as efficiently as possible. And then we're trying to get as much of the money that people pay for food because people do want to pay for their food and get as much of that money back to to the growers. And that's kind of what we're trying to do in a nutshell. So if you visit Wood Bank, you'll see lots of community activities, lots of wellbeing projects. But ultimately it's all focused on growing food. That's kind of what it's about. People come and have different needs and aspirations, but ultimately we're all collectively there, too, to see what we can grow in Stockport. Um, we are doing that in a range of ways. Kindling is really unique and lucky in that we can think five years ahead in terms of our activities and what we're trying to do constantly is trying to balance supply and demand. So there is this kind of latent demand out there, but actually getting local affordable sustainable organic food is really difficult. The challenges around the supply chain around supply. And if you dig deeper into it, the challenges go deeply into an ageing farming population, lack of investment, all these other things. So we do a lot of training courses trying to encourage a new generation of growers to give it a go. Um, we run something called Farm Start so you can come and join us and, uh, try out farming we had about We had about 50 60 people through the programme so far. Every year we run commercial growing courses for people to test them out. Um, and it's really just for people to have a commercial growing and see what those challenges are of all those people who have been for our programmes, very few of them, the growers at the moment there are such challenges. Um, and what we do as an organisation is be very honest about that from the outset. So if you come to us one of our sessions in September called, Do you want to be a farmer? We basically get one of our grumpiest growers to come along and explain how how tough it is and how bad a year they have, because there's a real romantic kind of like, um, you know, attraction to becoming a grower. But it's really, really tough. Um and so you come and join us and you give it a go, Uh huh, Yeah, You just see what it's like. And what's really unique about Woodbank is that we grow quite a lot of veg and we distribute it to organisations, but also we sell it. So although we're a charity and we do lots of well being and community activities, a lot of our core focus is kind of growing and selling produce. We sound to lots of different people, but ultimately it goes as directly to people as possible. And this is one of the challenges we face. The people who can afford our produce often are the ones who have lots of food choices. So here you can see that we're loading up one of the vans. This is going to the University of Manchester. The University of Manchester previously before covid a lot of public sector bodies committed to buy produce from us. We used to supply restaurants and cafes. We don't do that now, but we do run a box scheme. So we have about 450 people a week picking up the veg back from us. And there's some of that produce out there if you're interested. Um, but Woodbank isn't growing all that food? You know, like a site like Woodbank will grow about 50 60 grand's worth of produce a year, So there's lots of opportunities there you have to be good growers, and we're not. And you have to spend a lot of money on investment. Uh, and you know, the big polyphenols tunnels we have there. We're just really lucky with. We're still very reliant on volunteers you can come volunteer with us, learn about farming and growing. Um, we only take photos when it's sunny. Um, and that's just an opportunity to know about for people to learn about growing, but also to kind of the first step on the on the ladder to, uh, looking at commercial growing for them. Um, if you come and visit us, you'll see all the different crops we grow. Um, there's some very sad looking fennel there. Um, we're organic, so we spend a lot of time weeding. I sometimes wish we could spray, but we are very reliant on volunteers, and a site like that has lots of challenges because there's only so much automation and and, uh, machinery you can use. Um, we have volunteer days. Um, and also, we have lots of team challenge days. Businesses come down and join us, but also lots of the local community get involved. So, uh, Thursday's are pretty busy. There's usually about 40 people on site on Saturday there about 20 people. And, yeah, it's just an opportunity for people to come down. Help out. We have team challenge days. Uh, this is a local company. They've been building a wellbeing space with us, and a couple of weeks back we had 1,000 people, like 100 people from Lloyds, dropped in and helped out. And that's an opportunity for us to talk to people who don't normally think about sustainable food. Um, and we run a lot of community activities. So we had were involved in Open Farm Sunday. Recently we had 350 people through the door, and that's an opportunity for people to buy our produce. Let's make a little bit of income, but also to show people this site, the site, I would really encourage you to come down. It's, um we Wood Bank Park is amazing. Lots of people walking past but it's actually quite a hidden site. Um and so yeah, just opening up the site, especially with Covid coming to an end. There's a lot of people interested in what's going on just really quickly on our wellbeing side. Well being is really important to us. We have before covid were really keen to get involved in social prescribing. Uh, we had started a programme with local GP. So if you went to your GP struggling with anxiety or sleep problems, um, they could say OK, come to Wood bank spend five weeks with us, learn to cook, eat with the group, harvesting food, takeaway a veg bag and we've been working as covid is coming to an end, apparently, and people are venturing outside more. We're working with more groups, refugee groups and the like, Um, and the wellbeing thing is really important to us. Uh, this is a group weeding the herb garden. Ultimately, what we want to do is be independent of grants. At the moment, we are funded by the lottery. We have four or five members of staff on that site. Um, we are being funded by them less and less. And each year we're upping the amount of income we generate from social prescribing, um, sales and just running various courses and events and like and what we're trying to do is, uh, become independent of grants, generate income, but also not lose what we're about. And that's a real challenge in this in this day and age. Uh, this is Janice, one of our, uh, local volunteers who was actually on the site before before we took it on. And we do really, genuinely feel that we're looking after the site. We don't feel as if we own it. Stockport Council have been pretty fantastic giving their trust us on that site. They don't charge us rent yet. We don't pay electricity yet. They come in with clean our cabin once a week. Um, so, yeah, we are really keen to share the site with people and would be really keen for people to get in touch and come down and see us. Um just the last couple of slides are you know, this is what's going on at Woodbank, at the moment. You know, we have a store with selling veg. Local residents are selling the veg that they've grown. That money is going into a pot so they can make by another polytunnel. And if we apply for planning permission and it's just a really nice space, um, to for people to control of their their supply chain and the food system. And this was during, um, a typical kind of Thursday. And we just hope that with Covid coming, I keep saying kind of coming to an end isn't, but as people kind of get a lot more adventurous and going out a lot more, we're hoping that the site gets busier and busier. And just on my last slide, sorry. We have been running a programme at Woodbank with the council around fruit trees. Um, so if anyone ever needs any fruit trees, I know there's a programme that being being run by the council, but we have fruit trees. We have lots of plants. So if anyone ever needs any kind of help in setting up their projects or any advice, well, we definitely try and help. That's it.