Can Do Bristol: supporting food and growing projects

Our latest story is all about Can Do Bristol, a fantastic resource for potential volunteers in the city and for community groups to advertise for volunteers.

Hi, I’m Nic Ferris, green space lover, allotment and city farm worker and Bristol city council employee, working on the Can Do Bristol website – more on that later!

I was keen to take up the invite to write a guest blog for Bristol Good Food 2030. Particularly as the Get Growing Trail 2022 leaflet is sitting on my desk, reminding me of inspiring and joyful visits and giving me a nudge to follow up on conversations with proactive citizens that weekend.

What a glorious weekend it was last month to showcase Bristol-based vibrant, productive gardens and projects. It can’t be just me that gets a buzz out of simply stepping through the gateway of a new green space so obviously given attention by collective hands.

On that sunny Saturday, after a cycle up the railway path and through Speedwell playing fields I spotted the Get Growing Trail banner on Whitefield Road. I approached the volunteer welcomer on the gate. She’d been involved in the project for a year, helping tend the Edible Bristol beds on a regular basis.

I entered Speedwell allotments and walked up the slope to find Edible Bristol tucked away behind housing at the top of the site. Here I found colourful, smiley volunteers to match the rainbow veg and flower beds. I chatted with project lead Sara Venn and shared my anxious enthusiasm that I would simply want to get involved with all the gardens I was planning to visit that day. Wisely, Sarah suggested that my way of getting involved was perhaps to offer my time in another way other than attempting to weed every veg bed in Bristol. Having just told Sarah about my work co-managing Can Do Bristol, a “social networking” site for communities and active citizens her suggestion made sense!

And so – back to Can Do!        

Can Do Bristol has been around for a few years now. It had a huge growth spurt throughout 2020 and 2021 with 100s more organisations joining up and successfully recruiting volunteers and 1000s of residents signing up – many of these new members driven to join the Can Do community in order to support people and communities impacted by the pandemic.

So how could Can Do support Get Growing Trail projects?

• Organisations and projects can put a call out for volunteers free of charge using the site. Just create your group profile and then add your volunteer advert.
• Resident looking to get involved? There are nearly 350 opportunities on the site – You can narrow down your search by using the neighbourhood and theme search filters. For example, select “gardening/conservation” in Windmill Hill and you see a call out for helpers at Windmill Hill City Farm – a top fave with website visitors according to our search stats!
• Green space lovers, gardeners, growers – you can use the platform to connect and chat with likeminded members, perhaps create an online team (a growing community within a Can Do community!)

Currently Can Do Bristol has a membership of over 500 Bristol based groups and organisations and over 11,000 residents. 31 of the 346 volunteering opportunities relate to gardening and/or conservation tasks.

Could Can Do help grow the growing community?  

The annual Get Growing trail is such a wonderful event helping promote and connect some of the 100s of green space projects in Bristol. But I know from experience, when you’re involved in an allotment you rarely get to visit other projects on the trail – perhaps Can Do could help with this by supporting an online community of growers to connect. A layer of connecting compost on top of Bristol’s wonderful crop of gardening projects.

For more information about Can Do Bristol please contact: neighbourhoodsandcommunities@bristol.gov.uk.

By setting the wheels in motion now, together we can transform the future of food in our city, building in resilience over the next decade. So, what change do you want to see happen that will transform food in Bristol by 2030? Do you already have an idea for how Bristol can make this happen? Join the conversation by filling out the form below.