Wild Hive Ecological Educational Collective gets our local schools and neighbourhoods growing. Founder Jo Hutchison shares how they’re doing this.
Find the story of Wild Hive here. Discover here how Wild Hive is helping to grow a new HCF team: GreenTeam@HCF.
Permaculture design for people & place
We were very lucky to have been joined at the start of our journey by Liz Darley (Grow South Permaculture), who brought Permaculture principles to life for our expanding network at various local educational and community garden sites, including The Outdoor Wildlife Lodge at Otterbourne School, ‘The Hive’ (College House) in Compton (then Eastleigh College’s site), and Youth Options’ Outdoor Learning Centre in Bishopstoke.
Our projects and approach have been greatly informed by Children in Permaculture, and we continue to be helped and encouraged by that team and the network of practitioners and educators from The Permaculture Association.
Last year, we trialled a bespoke, condensed Practical Permaculture Intro mini-course with Eastleigh College’s Functional Skills/Enterprise students. We also realised the benefits of offering one-off Practical Permaculture Design Tasters, helping to draw active participants together at sites that are ripe for renovation.
‘Growing to School’ pilot
With the support from four local Primary Schools, in Spring 2022 we launched our ‘Growing to School’ pilot project, which involved:
- Creating 250 Little Local Grow Kits (Spring: Potatoes & Pollinators) for children to grow at home with the support of our online community (raising £550 for Save the Children’s Ukraine fund);
- Developing Local Grow Packs to make immediate use of the existing beds and growing spaces in schools;
- Trialling the formation of Green Teams of children and parents/carers to support growing activities; and,
- Running some in-class Children in Permaculture-style growing sessions to enable more children to have the opportunity to ‘grow a meal’ and be part of the perpetual growing cycle.
Changemakers at The Point (Eastleigh’s new Sustainability Hub)
Autumn 2022 marked the start of our Changemaker residency at The Point – as part of Eastleigh’s new Sustainability Hub. This was the prompt we needed to register as a Community Interest Company in order for our enterprise to become sustainable itself.
With a little seed funding from The National Lottery’s Community Fund (via The Point), we were able to develop and run a series of nature-led “Small but Mighty” Creative Imagining sessions for families and adults in Spring ‘23, and will continue to support The Point’s Big Ideas’ events and offer more seasonal sessions throughout the year.
Our Creative Imaginings sessions are intended to invite creative responses, as we adopt new perspectives to explore nature in our urban areas, and discover ways to appreciate and revitalise our local ecosystem.
Practical Permaculture Pathway for schools
This year, our focus for our ‘Growing to School project is on further developing a Practical Permaculture Pathway of transformative and curriculum linked sessions for children in schools.
During phase 2 of our pilot project, we will be running a series of Children in Permaculture-informed sessions at Scantabout Primary School in Chandlers Ford – aligned with our seasonal Local (School) Grow Packs that the children will be growing.
We are on the steering group for Southampton University’s Growing Wild Citizens project and considering ways that offerings such as ours could support hyper-local ‘hives’ of schools and practitioners – for sustainable school-site based growing/nature-led sessions. Also, as Community Representatives for HIWWT’s Team Wilder, we are looking into ways to develop our Practical Permaculture Pathway as a route that schools could follow to naturally be recognised as an HIWWT Wilder School: https://www.hiwwt.org.uk/Schools-groups.
Local (School) Grow Packs & Local (Home) Grow Kits
Developing and fully testing our Organic Local (School) Grow Packs is our other area of focus for 2023-24, and we are fortunate to have some excellent Seed Team advisors. Paul Dibden and Sarah Flynn are both HCF stakeholders, and Debra Cave is a Permaculture practitioner with a passion for perennials. We are also having help and advise from our friends at Aldermoor Community Farm.
Our four seasonal Local Grow Packs have been designed to grow meals that can be harvested within the school terms, but not necessarily needing to be grown in school settings. We are very grateful to the following test bed sites for allowing us to trial our Local Grow Packs with their user-groups – to see how much more ecological growing engagement, enthusiasm and enabling results from direct involvement and linked learning:
- Toynbee Secondary School
- Youth Options’ Outdoor Learning Centre
- Aldermoor Community Farm
- The Point
- Highbridge Community Farm
Growing beyond the plot
Alongside these longer term projects and activities, we’re using our Local Grow Packs and Kits for small group and one-off growing sessions, and are going to be championing the plotting of more accessible community growing spaces within our local “Good to Grow Network” – to enable more sharing of time, space, skills, resources and harvests.
Get involved
If you’re interested to get involved, find Wild Hive on Facebook and Instagram , email wildhivecollective@gmail.com, or fill in this form.