Irish Seed Savers Association Announce Community Seed Guardian Programme Awardees

Irish Seed Savers Association is delighted to announce that Ten Community Garden Groups have been awarded a place on the Community Seed Guardian Programme.

Irish Seed Savers will provide these ten community gardens training and mentoring in seed growing and seed saving with experienced facilitators, learning the steps to enhance seed supply for community gardeners around the island of Ireland, without having to rely on food seed imports to grow their own food. Training community growing groups to grow and save their own food seed will increase access to seed availability and create greater community engagement with the full food
supply from seed to plate.

Irish Seed Savers Announce Community Seed Programme Awardees

The Ten Community Gardens Groups selected to participate in the Community Seed Guardian

Programme are:

Mud Island Community Garden, Dublin City

Monart Farm, Wexford

Kildare Town Community Garden, Kildare

Millenium Community Garden, Tipperary

Gairdín Gortahork, Donegal

Rossinver Community Garden, Leitrim

Bantry Community Garden, Cork

Kildorrery Community Garden, Cork

Trellick Community Garden, Galway

Ballina Karen Community Garden, Mayo

This training and mentoring programme for communities across Ireland to grow and save their own food seed was developed with funding received through Rethink Ireland’s Innovate Together programme and Community Foundations Ireland.

About Irish Seed Savers Association

Irish Seed Savers Association CLG has been in operation since 1991. Originating from an ambitious effort to create a central store of food crop seeds and fruit trees where none had previously existed, our work to date has been to research and protect rare, heritage and naturalised
open pollinated food crop seeds and fruit trees on our 20 acre farm in County Clare.

Curating the country’s public seed bank of 600 varieties of heritage seed and the country’s 180 varieties of heritage apple trees, our work has expanded over the years to include an education and outreach
remit to not only connect more people to our work, but also to ensure the protection of these collections for the encouraging more people to grow open pollinated seeds for their food supply.

Our main aim for our collections are preservation (find), conservation (keep alive through growing), and utilisation (sharing) for the continuation of these heritage food sources for now and future
generations.

Irish Seed Savers is a registered charity (number 20045029) and non-profit social enterprise.

About the Innovate Together Fund

The Government of Ireland, through the Department of Rural and Community  Development (via the Dormant Accounts Fund), committed €5M to the Innovate  Together Fund as part of a €40M
support package to the community and voluntary  sector in May. Rethink Ireland have since received additional donations from the Z  Zurich Foundation, Medtronic, Twitter and Oakfield Trust. The Fund supports charities’ innovative responses to the COVID-19 crisis that will also provide lasting change.

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