Community profile: The Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens is a registered charity which supports, represents and promotes community-managed farms, gardens, allotments and other green spaces, creating opportunities for local communities to grow.

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What are your aims?

To help city farms and community gardens to carry out their work of building the capacity of local people, often in deprived areas, to enrich and improve their own lives.

Many people assume that city farms and community gardens are simply nice places to visit where plants are grown and animals kept. But that is far from the whole picture.

Not only do these community projects create a patch of welcoming green space to visit, but also offer an amazing array of benefits and opportunities. These can include education programmes, play schemes, healthy living initiatives, work and skills training, social enterprises, volunteer opportunities, environmental schemes, horticultural therapy groups, facilities for people with disabilities ... the list goes on.

City farms and community gardens are places where people of all ages, all ethnic backgrounds and all abilities are made welcome. And by creating opportunities they help build better communities. It really is that simple.

The Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens (FCFCG) is a charity which supports, represents and promotes community-managed farms, gardens, allotments and school farms, creating opportunities for communities to grow. FCFCG helps empower local people, often in deprived areas, to build closer, healthier and more integrated communities across the UK. We also provide the national face of the community farm and garden movement, working to raise its profile with policy-makers, funders and the public.

What are city farms and community gardens?

They are community-managed projects working with people, animals and plants. They range from tiny wildlife gardens to fruit and vegetable plots on housing estates, from community polytunnels to large city farms.

They exist mainly in urban areas and are created in response to a lack of access to green space, combined with a desire to encourage strong community relationships and an awareness of gardening and farming.

City farms and community gardens are often developed by local people in a voluntary capacity, and commonly retain a strong degree of volunteer involvement. Some larger community farms and gardens employ many workers whilst others are run solely by small groups of dedicated volunteers. Most are run by a management committee of local people and some are run as partnerships with local authorities, whilst retaining strong local involvement.

What do they look like?

There is no typical city farm or community garden as each develops according to the local area and in response to the needs of the local community.

All city farms have farm animals but the variety and numbers vary greatly. They may also have mini-allotments, nature areas, picnic sites and flower beds, play areas, training rooms and meeting rooms.

Community gardens can be even more varied, with some being entirely food growing projects only open to certain users, whilst others are ornamental gardens open to the general public. All city farms have paid staff and so do a few of the community gardens. However, all of them rely on regular volunteers to operate.

What is common about city farms and community gardens?

With such a diverse range of groups it may be sometimes difficult to say what they all share. However most will:

* Be run by elected committees of those who use the project

* Aim to be responsive to the changing needs of their community

* Rely on volunteers for a lot of the work

* Have greatly improved previously derelict or underused land

* Show social and environmental sustainability (eg by being controlled by their local communities) and use organic methods

* Committed to educating people about farming and gardening

How did the movement start?

Community gardening, as we know it today, began in the early 1960s, as a result of community action in response to declining standards in public spaces, and a need to take control of these spaces and regenerate local community spirit.

In the 1960s the growth of community action was in part a reaction against a lack of control and access to resources. Many communities set up all manner of groups such as youth clubs, under fives groups, tenant or resident associations, community centres and elderly projects. Similarly some groups around the country saw derelict land in their neighbourhoods and decided that it should be used as a community garden; a place that is run by the community to meet their own needs. Part of the inspiration for this was the growth of the community garden movement in the United States.

Over the years more community gardens were established but many depended on short-term lease agreements or indeed squatting. In 1972 the first City Farm was established in Kentish Town, London. This larger project not only included gardening space but also farm animals. City farms are community gardens with farm livestock, the first one being influenced by the children's farm movement in the Netherlands.

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Subsequently other city farms were set up in London and in 1976 the first one outside London was opened in Bristol.

What does FCFCG do?

We now represent nearly 130 city and school farms, around 1000 community gardens, a growing number of community-managed allotments and about 200 city farms and community gardens in development.

Between them our members employ 550 people, engage and empower 22,000 volunteers and attract more than three million visitors each year. Their estimated combined annual turnover is 40 million [pounds sterling].

The groups we represent are incredibly diverse in size and location. They include city and school farms, community gardens and orchards, allotment gardens and just about any other piece of community-managed green space, both in urban areas and, increasingly, isolated rural communities.

We also offer our services to any other organisation running a community farm or garden (for example local authorities, schools, trusts, hospitals, housing associations and public buildings).

We are on hand to offer support and advice to community-managed farms and gardens, from fledgling groups to well-established sites. We do this through a regional staff team and a network of fieldworkers, who regularly visit sites and are available to discuss anything from a leaky roof to a funding application form.

We know that our members are hands-on kind of people, so our staff organise regional networking events, allowing people to meet up and swap ideas. We also run training workshops and encourage our members to visit each others sites so everyone learns from each other.

In addition, FCFCG provides information services, publications, newsletters, online services and funding information via our grass-roofed eco building in Bristol.

The other part of our job is to give a voice to community-managed farms and gardens as a whole. We represent 'the movement' at policy level, forging relationships with national and regional government and funding bodies and pushing the needs, concerns and benefits of our groups up the policy agenda. We also work in partnership with other national organisations where applicable, to help the interests of our member groups.

And finally we also try to raise the profile of community-managed farms and gardens among the public and media to help people better understand just how important these grass-roots groups can be to people right across the UK.

What have been your main challenges so far? How have you tackled them?

Like most small charities we are always working to full capacity and sometimes beyond, in order to give our members the best support we can. Funding can also be an issue, especially finding money for our core work rather than more specialised project work.

One of our main challenges has been to persuade the public and policy makers of the true benefits that our member groups create within their local communities, in order that there is more recognition--and funding--of this sort of work. Those perceptions are definitely changing, due in part to our work forging links with Government Departments in order to help shape national policy.

We also have a very good track record working with other organisations in partnerships and consortiums, which allows us to punch above our weight on certain issues. For example our Director Jeremy Iles was chair of the consortium which helped bring about the Local Food Programme, a Big Lottery funding scheme which is giving 50m [pounds sterling] in grants to encourage people to produce food locally.

We have also had success by managing projects and initiatives like the School Farms Network and the Allotments Regeneration Initiative, which has helped with the resurgence in interest in allotments across the UK.

What is next for the Federation?

We are currently involved in the Blue Peter Mission Nutrition appeal, which aims to help children grow and eat better food. Our members are supporting this by holding bring and buy sales, but they will also have an opportunity to benefit from the money raised as a percentage of it will be spent on helping create food growing plots in schools and other educational venues across the UK.

Food and food production is playing an increasingly important role in what we do in general. We are hoping to gain funding to put in place a project which will offer support to the burgeoning number of food growing groups which are springing up in the UK. We are also looking into new innovations in community gardening, for example working with social housing schemes to ensure there is community land available for people to create gardens. We are also hoping to promote the benefits of our community farming and gardening movement to more excluded groups, such as ethnic minority communities.

But our main job as always will be the work we do in offering support to local community groups that are using their bit of green space to make tangible opportunities for local people to have a better life. www.landrestorationtrust.org.uk