Page 73 - ALG Issue 3 2019

Welcome to our new members...
Heron Way Community Allotment West Ham Allotment Society Ltd
1 Life Member
9 Individual Members
New Allotment Mentor joins the region
We are pleased to welcome Paula Owen, who will be our second London Mentor and work with Grant and Jeff to support members and allotments in London. Her contact details are at the top of the page, please do not hesitate to get in touch if you need support. Paula has a plot on the Isle of Dogs and spent time as Chair of the Association. Paula has also had experience with fundraising and developing new projects and is keen to increase communication in the region via social media.
Paula has a personal blog on Facebook called Green Shed Diaries and has recently created
a London Allotments Facebook group that she would like to invite you to join. Search for London Allotments NAS. This group is run by the London NAS Mentors for plotholders within the London Region. We’ll be sharing news, events, advice and growing tips for our Region and beyond! It’s a place to exchange information and generally get everyone connected!
Allotment Management Training Workshop London Borough of Lewisham
It started with an almost throwaway comment at the October 2018 London Allotment Officers Forum in Haringey: “We provide training for our self- managed sites.” Ears pricked up; the comment was from Peter Maynard, the Green Space Contract Officer from the London Borough of Lewisham. Their first training session lasted some two hours longer than advertised.
The second was held at the Catford Civic Centre in early April this year.
It was held on a Saturday which was useful for getting those committee members of self-managed sites to attend if they are in paid employment, but equally importantly requiring the local government officer to give up his or her weekend time. Crucially, once the simple formalities of welcome, introductions and housekeeping were out of the way, the event was a varied programme of activities, with individual projects at one end and whole meeting sessions at the other, with group activities taking no more than twenty minutes before a switch to a different type of interaction was made.
A quick quiz started the event. Some questions to cover legal facets of allotments: “How soon can a new plotholder be evicted after signing the tenancy agreement?” Some dealing with the local authorities’ requirements, usually embedded in its tenancy agreement: “Between what dates are bonfires permitted?” And then some covering the foods prepared from allotment crops: “What vegetable is used to make Imam Byaldi?” An open discussion took place immediately after completion of this lively icebreaker,
and then a more directed session
on the roles of self-managed sites’ committees and officers and refreshers on the serving of notices to quit, which set out four clear stages in the process with that first vital interaction being labelled a “nudge letter” which is
what it is. Next in line was a series of separate group activities looking at
individual case studies illustrating a particular problem that could arise. What these varied sessions showed was a two-way flow of views. The members of the associations present gained a clear statement of Lewisham’s position on allotment issues and Peter Maynard got constructive feedback on the concerns from the allotment sites.
The main part of the last sessions covered something that affects us
all, and which does have a special
but unacknowledged relevance to allotments both in terms of their uses and the people they bring together. The benefits to mental health of allotments is known to all allotment holders,
but not made known to the general public to anything like the degree that
it should be. “It is my church” said
one long-term allotment holder on
my own site, and the engagement (whether we are consciously aware
of it or not) with nearly all the lower levels of the ecosystem puts us and our dominion in perspective. For others that engagement with cultivation means a lot more and demands recognition and care. More than that, allotmenteering will bring you into contact with others – people you would not otherwise know. Strangers have needs, principally recognition in the polite sense, and
this is where devolved associations do have a need to go beyond care of the precious resource of their own sites
to the care of their equally precious members. This particular topic of mental health on allotments was very much the product of one person’s involvement at this training session. I have not heard it talked about publicly in any other forum.
Not all of Lewisham’s self-managed sites were present and the extent of the management devolved to these sites
in Lewisham does not extend to them having leases, nor the issuing of the final formal notices to quit, but they
do have important responsibilities in their agreements. I know of no other
“It is my church” said one long-term allotment holder on my own site
London borough that does this type
of training in such a systematic and collective way. Looking at it rather coldly it would seem to offer each of the parties involved real benefits. It gives the associations a clarity in the local authority’s procedures to ease their work, and from the local authority’s view it offers the possible greater saving of officer time (and therefore money) with this type of training than without it. Without it, issues that have been set out and accepted would then come trickling in one by one, and collectively they will then require far more time (and money again) to be spent on them.
Jeff Barber
Allotment and Leisure Gardener 73