improving health And Sport

 

Roots and Fruits

Roots & Fruits is a community garden enterprise where members learn all about organic gardening and horticulture. The produce is sold from a mobile shop serving over 300 customers in 19 East Lothian towns and villages. The group also delivers subsidised fruit to schools and nurseries to encourage children to eat a balanced diet.

Through the group’s schools and nurseries garden projects, around 200 children learn how to grow fruit and veg and how to eat a nutritious diet. It’s working so well many schools are now developing their own gardens. Roots & Fruits also teach adults how to prepare low cost healthy meals. The courses are open to all, but they are especially useful for young families whose cookery skills haven’t been handed down through the generations.

The Scottish Community Foundation recently granted the group £1,830 to develop a new venture selling fresh fruit to businesses to encourage healthier, affordable options at lunch time.

“We have been given great opportunities by the Scottish Community Foundation and it has helped us to develop our project in many ways.”
Pamela McKinley
Project Manager

How your money could help:

  • £500 could buy all the seeds and compost to run the school gardens projects for 1 year
  • £100 could provide 1000 children with a free piece of fruit
  • £50 could help run a cookery workshop
  • £25 could carry out a health promotion session for up to 30 people of any age

 

Charleston Healthy Action Troopers (CHAT)

This group was formed when local mums saw there was a need for exercise classes in the area. The group used their organisational and persuasive skills to secure their local school hall for adult fitness classes and arranged a creche so single parents could also attend the classes.

The Foundation awarded CHAT £5,281 towards the cost of getting their group up and running, including funding training courses and some equipment.

 

Dancebase, Edinburgh

This group has established a programme working with disadvantaged young people using dance as a therapeutic tool in nurseries, sheltered housing, special schools and community centres.

The Foundation awarded it a £4,000 grant to take its classes for children out into disadvantaged areas of the community.  The grant included a special Caledonian Challenge Tenth Anniversary grant of £1,000 to enable the group to extend these sessions to under-fives, following research that indicated a strong appetite for lessons and value in providing physical activity in the form of dance for young children.