A place on Edventure’s Start-up Course

My name is Jack Belcher and I am raising money to help fund a community and social enterprise in Frome this Autumn.

During Edventure’s 13th Start-Up course, I will be spending 10 weeks turning an old plant nursery into a thriving community hub! Our challenge will be working to create a land-based education project aiming to tackle social isolation and contribute to mental and physical wellbeing.

Edventure Frome runs free courses helping young adults to move towards livelihoods that matter to them and this course will help me on my journey, giving me the skills and tools needed to start and maintain community enterprises.

This will include learning about:

• Community engagement
• Social impact
• Conflict resolution
• Collaboration tools
• Facilitation skills and more

My own dream is to work as a Permaculture Practitioner, redesigning our local human landscapes in to multifunctional spaces that provide for all our needs and more. This will help reduce conflict over space and resources, while freeing up valuable time for people to truly follow their dreams. Giving people the ability to meet their own energy, food, water and spacial needs from within the landscape directly around them gives more power to individuals to determine their own lives and reduces the dependancy on permanent employment, foreign energy and farmland. This, in turn, gives people more resilience in their lives and the power to make better, more ethical decisions about where they work and what they buy, and hopefully reducing pollution, conflict, poverty, depression and a whole host of other negative outcomes related to dependancy on large corporations and sovereign states.

By helping me to reach my fundraising target, you will not only be helping us to start up this Community Garden project but you will also be supporting me to move towards my dream of changing the world, and making things more fair and equal for all.