Q Gardens awarded National Lottery funding

Q Gardens in the Community

Once again Q Gardens is celebrating after being awarded almost £10,000 in National Lottery funding. The money has been given to help develop their ‘Men in Sheds’ project and to enhance the building of raised beds for community groups to use.

The purpose of Q Gardens is to provide a green space for the local residents of Kirkholt and the wider community to use for the promotion of wellbeing, fitness and enjoyment, whilst gardening in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way.

Local volunteer Barbara Smith said: “We are delighted. We can now press ahead with the ‘Men in Shed’s’ idea and with developing more raised beds for use by people from our community”. She continued “Whilst we obviously welcome people with gardening experience it’s not a priority. With us it’s all about ‘community’ and bringing people together to enjoy being outdoors. The Men in Shed scheme will offer a different opportunity and volunteers will be able to make and mend items that help out the garden, as well as learning and developing new skills.”

Jan Kidd, fundraiser said: “We’re very pleased that The National Lottery Community Fund has recognised our work in this way. Now, thanks to National Lottery players we will be able to press on with our plans to broaden the range of opportunities available to local people. Gardening is such a good way to make friends, get fit, learn skills, relieve anxiety, and generally put the world to rights.”

The gardens are located on Queen’s Drive in Rochdale. They currently open on Wednesdays and Sundays from 10am until afternoon, and volunteers can work for any length of time. People are welcome to come along and individually volunteer to help with the communal beds, or to volunteer as a school or community group to work on one of the community beds.

If you or your group would like to volunteer you can get more information by emailing qgardensinthecommunity@gmail.com, visit the group's Facebook page, or pop along anytime during opening hours.

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.