‘They may well think that food just appears in plastic bags’: Growing Communities launches £450,000 bid for Dagenham education hub

Alice Ashlea and schoolchildren at Dagenham Farm. Photograph: Growing Communities

A local gardening organisation is looking to raise £450,000 to build a “state-of-the-art” education hub on its Dagenham farm.

Growing Communities, a Hackney-based social enterprise, is a community-led group that promotes sustainable vegetable cultivation. 

The education hub, designed by architect Ackroyd Lowrie, will include a classroom for up to 30 children, wheelchair-accessible toilets, hand washing stations and a sheltered courtyard entrance.

In 2025 alone, Growing Communities welcomed over 80 school groups to their Dagenham site, where they offer interactive workshops.

From teaching visitors how to grow fruit and veg to sampling tasters, the new education hub would provide a dedicated space for generations of schoolchildren and local residents to learn about food origins, the benefits of organically sourced food and our relationship with the natural world through what we eat.

Schoolkids at William Bellamy Primary school attend a workshop. Photograph: Growing Communities

To learn more about Growing Communities’ educational work, the Citizen spoke with Sophie Verhagen, who joined the organisation over 20 years ago, initially as a packer.

“I was actually a veg scheme member myself, and then they were advertising for packers, so I joined,” she said. “I was concerned about the climate situation even 20 years ago, and I wanted to be involved in a group that was working to address those environmental problems. I was really pleased that there was one on my doorstep that I could get involved with.

“I started packing on the veg scheme, helping out with the market and then I did the growing traineeship in 2009, and then, about three years later, I got a job working as the assistant grower, and then 10 years ago, I got my current job as head grower in Hackney.”

Growing Communities, which began 30 years ago as a community-supported agriculture (CSA) group linked to a farm outside of London, quickly adopted the veg scheme model. Their scheme offers a weekly subscription bag of fresh, organic, seasonal fruit and veg to households across North, East and South London. 

Sophie explains, “We run the farmers’ market in Stoke Newington, outside St Paul’s Church. We have multiple collection points around the borough where people can pick up their bags. They can choose what size bag they want — whether it’s a small, medium or large bag of seasonal organic produce — and they can pick it up from a huge number of collection points in Hackney.

“We try and source our produce from as close to London as possible, reducing food miles, reducing the length of supply chains and reducing packaging. It comes into our distribution hub called the Better Food Shed, which is in Bow, and then it gets brought to Hackney. 

Alice Holden at Dagenham Farm. Photograph: Growing Communities

“We make sure our supply chains are really short, so the money is not just going to the people in the middle. There’s virtually no packaging unless it’s salad or leafy greens.

“It’s grown nearby, so there are virtually no food miles — we’re not using fuel to transport things halfway across the globe. We never airfreight things. If anything is coming from further than the UK or Europe, it’s always shipped by freight. And we also don’t grow in heated greenhouses, so we’re not using extra energy for that. We’re just trying to grow seasonally, because there’s a huge amount we can grow seasonally and show people what’s possible.”

“People are very positive,” Sophie said. “We’re also trying to foster community — the fact that people pick up their veg from collection points means that they might meet other people from the local area. They really like the fact that we also have recipes on the website, loads of recipes, so if they’re confronted with a vegetable that they perhaps wouldn’t have chosen to buy, there’s a lot of options for how to cook them.”

Beyond the veg scheme, Growing Communities also offer a range of interactive workshops for young people at their two sites in Hackney and their Dagenham farm.

“We’ve been hosting educational visits for about 20 years,” Sophie said, “and we work with local schools. In 2024, we had 300 pupils come to our sites from Harrington Hill school and St Thomas Abney.

“We had a great influx of primary school children. Every year we have schools through an organisation called School Food Matters. We’re really keen for local schools to get in touch to see if they want to have a visit.

“We encourage them to try the produce on the site, to try their hand at sowing seeds. We talk about seasonality, about the connection with nature, and we encourage them to grow whatever small amount they can at home or at school to connect them with what they eat.

“It’s been amazing to see how many of them are prepared to just try things that I’ve picked off the plants and washed on the site, especially given that they’re mostly green leaf vegetables.

The greenhouse at Dagenham Farm. Photograph: Growing Communities

“It’s just so valuable. A lot of the kids don’t have gardens. They may not go to parks very often, and they may never see food growing in its natural habitat.

“It may be a bit of a cliché, but they may well think that food just appears in plastic bags in supermarkets and don’t have any sense of the whole process.

“For them to see that it’s growing in the ground, for them to plant their own seeds, sow their own seeds and see them germinate and then eat whatever comes of it — that has huge value. To connect them with nature, with the cycle of growing and with what they eat. And if they pick something themselves and eat it, they’re much more likely to try unfamiliar things.

“Dagenham have been doing work with local primary schools ever since the inception of the farm. They’re aware of how beneficial it is because our farm in Dagenham is in the middle of a food desert. There are literally no food shops around there at all, and everybody has to get the bus or take a car to get to a local supermarket — no grocery stores, never mind a farmers’ market.”

For anyone looking to get involved, Sophie’s message is straightforward: “Give it a try. We’re providing an alternative to what is a broken food system that doesn’t pay the farmers properly and relies on cheap labour all the way round, and doesn’t benefit the customer that much either. So come and give us a go.

“And also try your hand at growing — it’s not as hard as you might think. You can grow things on your windowsill; you don’t need an outside space. It’s great if you have one, but you can start small — just grow some herbs or some salad leaves, they’re really simple. I would go for it.”

Find out about the Growing Communities fundraiser here.