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Groundwork Northamptonshire is a charity working to mobilise practical community action on poverty and the environment across Northamptonshire. We’re passionate about creating a future where every neighbourhood is vibrant and green, every community is strong and able to shape its own destiny and nominee is held back by their back ground or circumstances.

We give people the care they need towards and at the end of their life, supporting them to live as well as possible with their illness by adding life to their days. We also help their families and carers to cope practically and emotionally. When our patients reach the end of their journey, we help them to die with dignity and with as little suffering as possible and we support their families through the process of bereavement. We offer care via our 14 bed inpatient unit, home care through our Community Team and outpatient services through our Wellbeing Centre. We have to raise approximately £2.6 million each year from voluntary sources to ensure these services can be delivered free at the point of care. Our nurses care for the patients both in the hospice and in their own homes. We offer care and support to patients based on their individual choices and needs. Many of our community patients also benefit from our Wellbeing Centre which include: gentle exercise, meditation and breathing classes, a gardening club, art and other creative activities, counselling, welfare advice, complementary therapies and spiritual care. For the duration of the patient’s illness, our hospice becomes an extension of the family. We are the people the patient and family members turn to when they have questions or need reassurance. The hospice supports nearly 700 patients and their families each year. Once a patient dies, our care does not stop. We offer bereavement counselling and remembrance services to the family members. Many people also want to stay in contact with the hospice through volunteering and fundraising for us.

After several years of working in the local community Storm now has the opportunity to develop an allotment project. For 8 years now we have been gardening in the town centre on various plots of land given to us by the local council - mixing up the planting with flowers and vegetables and brightening up the plots with various knitted items produced by our Make n Munch group. We have also been feeding members of the local rough sleeping and insecurely housed community for the last 6 years - initially running a soup run, laterally offering a hot meal once a week and for the third year running coordinating and hosting one night a week of Worthing's Winter Night Shelter. Since all the changes that Covid brought which meant that voluntary groups are no longer able to run Shelters, we now run a twice weekly food run which is open to anyone in need. We have built a good reputation among the local community and been able to offer opportunities to the people we feed to get involved in some of our other projects - knitting, gardening, litter picking, Recovery Course. Now we have a brilliant opportunity to manage an allotment for Storm. This will enable us to build relationships, offer real opportunities for people to learn skills, be part of a great team and produce food that can then be cooked, eaten and served to others.