Can you help some Hackney families come camping for the very first time?
In the August school holidays, we want to take twelve families from East London to Green Farm in Kent, to spend four blissful days exploring, feeding chickens, making water slides, climbing trees.
Grown-ups will learn to put up tents, cook on camp stoves and create cosy sleeping places - and to love seeing their children run off to play outdoors with a bunch of new friends.
Children will pick their own vegetables to put on their pizzas, roast marshmallows and play.
Some of the families will have been camping with us before and will pass on their knowledge, most will be brand new.
We have been taking Hackney families camping for almost ten years now, partnering with
Pearce Coggan Foundation based at Green Farm Kent. To join, families must have never been camping with their children and face barriers to going camping by themselves such as finance, lack of knowledge and lack of friends to go with.
This is what some previous parent's have said:
We have the tents (supplied by Vango and Marmot), we have sleeping bags, mats and cooking equipment (bought with a previous grant from The National Lottery), and we have an amazing space to camp in provided by the
Pearce Coggan Foundation.But to get there, we need:
Recently the papers are full of reports showing that English children are the saddest they have ever been. And we know 24% of Londons children - and far more in the lowest income brackets - get outdoors less than once a month.
We help families to get outdoors regularly by helping them make friends with other local families who also want to explore more, to learn the key skills needed to go outdoors and by helping them find places to get outdoors locally. If gear is a challenge we have camping gear to lend and waterproofs to borrow or keep.
All we ask of the families that join our programmes is that they get outdoors more themselves, they make sure their children play outdoors several times a week and they take their friends.
Over 80% of the families we work with now go outdoors more.
Can you help us take another group camping this summer?
