The last few months have seen lot of new input into our farm plans, with new faces, new funding and an ever-increasing information base helping move them on at quite a pace.
We’ve had some great news about funding. Shared Assets were recently successful in a funding bid to work with us, the Ecological Land Co-operative and Organic Lea growers co-operative – to support us all to look for land, and help us overcome obstacles to acquiring land. Additionally in the last few weeks we were approached to discuss a potential donation of between £80,000 and £100,000 towards the land and/or infrastructure, with the hope that this will help give other funders and potential investors confidence in our plans (it’s certainly helping give us confidence in our plans – very exciting!).
The report comissioned by the Esmee Fairburn Foundation, looking at the viability of the future farm, has been finished. While further research is recommended, it concludes that ‘Kindling's proposal for the farm/social enterprise centre and centre for social change is viable in terms of:
- soil types, availability of water and climate present in the region
- farms of the required size are available in the area and
- there are organic farms that are financially viable of the size and type proposed.
And says that they ‘would be delighted to be involved!’. So we are waiting to discuss next steps with Esmee Fairbairn Foundation who requested and funded the report.
The work funded by the lottery’s Big Potential fund to get us investment ready for setting up the social enterprise hub element of the proposal is also coming along. Fifty five producers/social enterprises filled out our survey about the hub and its facilities and we are currently speaking to a number of similar business centres to help us put together our feasibility study.
The Kindling farm is going to be a Community Benefit Society (should be up and running within the next 2 weeks!). It will be a co-op of community shareholders plus all the initiatives based at the farm – the community enterprise hub, the producers co-op (running the farm element), the centre for social change, and the housing co-op.
For us this is particularly exciting as it means that the Kindling farm is starting life as a wider group of us working together, and with more heads on board to develop cunning plans to make it happen! (we’ve just got to agree on the name now…).
We have recently widened our base of support by establishing an advisory group of amazing people, who have experience and skills in setting up and running initiatives all over the UK. Incredibly everyone we asked said yes – so we feel super lucky to have such a great bunch of brains on board!