St. Andrew’s, Great Ryburgh Gardening Team celebrate after receiving £6,000 of National Lottery funding to maintain their green space for the benefit of local people.
The local church and community group at St. Andrew’s, Great Ryburgh, near Fakenham, is celebrating after being awarded £6,000 in National Lottery funding to support its work maintaining and enhancing the green space around its community building.
The Friday Morning Team has been running for over a decade to care for the churchyard and ensure it is a welcoming place where local people and visitors can enjoy a moment of peace and gain benefit from the natural world. The gardeners plant and weed, mow and water, enjoying the regular commitment and social contact and taking a pride in looking after the plants from one season to another.
In 2020, St. Andrew’s opened a new flint and brick community building and obtained from the Diocese the use of the surrounding field. The activities of the Friday Morning Team were extended to larger scale mowing and hedging as the volunteers transformed the field into a venue for outdoor events, such as barbecues and social gatherings, while respecting its biodiversity. In March of this year disaster struck when the aged ride-on mower broke down beyond repair. A domestic push mower was no replacement!
Help came from The National Lottery Community Fund which enabled the mowing machine to be replaced. This was beyond our dreams! The National Lottery Community Fund distributes money raised by National Lottery players for good causes and is the largest community funder in the UK.
Anne Prentis, Churchwarden at St. Andrew’s, Great Ryburgh says: “We are so grateful to the National Lottery players who gave such a boost to our group by recognising our work in this way. Hospitality is very important to us and our green surroundings play a large part in the welcome we can offer as well as enhancing the wellbeing of those who come our way. New volunteers, do come forward! No experience necessary”.
The St Andrew’s calendar for the coming weeks includes a concert on 26th July, a barbecue on 3rd August and an Arts Festival over the August Bank Holiday Weekend, so plenty of opportunity to come and have a look!
Peter Trent, the volunteer mower, says “After years of struggling with cast off mowers and never ending repairs, it is such a privilege to be able to work with an efficient machine that both saves time and does an excellent job. We are grateful to Ben Burgess of Beeston for their advice when choosing a suitable mower.”
The National Lottery Community Fund recently launched its new strategy, ‘It starts with community’, which will underpin its efforts to distribute at least £4 billion of National Lottery funding by 2030.
As part of this, the funder has four key missions, which are to support communities to come together, be environmentally sustainable, help children and young people thrive and enable people to live healthier lives.
National Lottery players raise over £30 million a week for good causes across the UK. Thanks to them, last year The National Lottery Community Fund was able to distribute over half a billion pounds (£615.4 million) of life-changing funding to communities.
To find out more visit www.TNLCommunityFund.org.uk