Award-winning local charity, Green Synergy are delighted to announce a National Lottery award of £452,459 from The National Lottery Community Fund to continue its work supporting people to access green spaces through community gardening, community events and activities.
Green Synergy was established in 2023 as a charity and is based on Roman Pavement in Lincoln. Our vision is creating healthier and caring communities connecting nature, people and plants and our mission is to inspire, enable and empower people in Greater Lincolnshire to meet, grow, learn and thrive through community gardening and connecting with nature. In 2023 and 2024 Green Synergy won the Best Gardening and Horticulture Charity- East Midlands in the Non-Profit Organisation Awards.
The charity currently manages two community gardens, Hillside Garden and Ellie’s Memorial Garden and is developing outreach urban gardening and our work supports people of all ages in the most under-served communities in Lincolnshire to improve their mental and physical wellbeing.
Our charity delivers community gardening and therapeutic horticulture programmes to support people in the most under-served communities in Lincolnshire to improve their mental and physical wellbeing whilst managing the green spaces in environmentally responsible ways. We offer garden design and build services supporting local communities to develop green spaces into new community garden in a sustainable and responsible manner.
Green Synergy is so much more than a gardening charity with volunteering, older people warm and cool spaces activities and community engagement events to bring people together in our community gardens and spaces supporting people living in Lincolnshire to improve their mental health and wellbeing.
The new funding from The National Lottery Community Fund, which distributes money raised by National Lottery players for good causes and is the largest funder of community activity in the UK, will see our Branching Out project team working with 4,500 participants per year increasing to 5,470 participants by year four of the project. The project also aims to reduce isolation and create a sense of community ownership and care by bringing people together in green spaces; increase volunteers’ skills and confidence and extend Green Synergy’s reach into under-served communities in Lincoln and Lincolnshire through attendance at events.
Ali Talbot, CEO of Green Synergy said:
“We are so delighted that The National Lottery Community Fund has recognised our important charitable work in this way. Now, thanks to National Lottery players we will be able to widen our reach, support our communities to grow, bring more people into the gardens and green spaces and also enable us to work to sustain our organisation for the long term by diversifying our income. Thank you to everyone who has supported our charity and we look forward to working across Lincolnshire in the coming four years to enable a real impact with our communities, volunteers, partnership and our brilliant staff team”.
The National Lottery Community Fund recently launched its 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 (2023/24) The National Lottery Community Fund awarded over half a billion pounds (£686.3 million) of life-changing funding to communities across the UK, supporting over 13,700 projects to turn their great ideas into reality.
To find out more visit www.TNLCommunityFund.org.uk
