Save Belhaven Community Garden
NHS Lothian have announced the closure of Belhaven Hospital and their intention to dispose of the site, including the land used as Belhaven Community Garden, as ‘surplus’ to their requirements.
We need your support for taking Belhaven Community Garden into community ownership so as to protect this asset for the benefit of everyone living in the Dunbar and East Linton ward in the long term.
In 2012,
with the support of NHS Lothian, Sustaining Dunbar took over management of part of the hospital grounds and established Belhaven Community Garden. Since then we have created a thriving community garden which provides:
- A Therapeutic Space–that helps to enhance the mental and physical health and wellbeing of a wide range of local people and groups.
- A Growing Space–for herbs, flowers, fruit and vegetables, for anyone who wants to come together to grow food with others in a supportive, sharing environment.
- A Learning Space–supporting training and sharing of practical food growing and regenerative land-care skills, for all ages and abilities.
- A Biodiverse Space -that is developing the range and variety of habitats so as to enhance the number and variety of species in the garden and its soil.
Community ownership will enable us to:
- build on the work that we have already started to develop a healthy, diverse natural ecosystem and greenspace that supports the biodiversity and wellbeing of our community and builds resilience to climate change.
- create new opportunities for a wide range of people to develop general employability skills and train in specific skills for regenerative land management and organic food growing in the heart of our community and accessible by active travel.
- help people to develop a deeper connection to nature and an understanding of nature’s closed loop cycles -encouraging people to value the development of a truly circular, sharing economy.
- enable many more opportunities for healthy, outdoor, physical activity that enhances physical health and mental wellbeing, encourages social interaction between diverse participants, provides space for local food growing and supports community resilience.
We have started the process
of developing a ‘community asset transfer‘ application to bring the garden into community ownership. We are currently in discussion with NHS Lothian and will use this website to keep our community updated as we go through this process which is likely to take many months.
