The start of Incredible Edible Knowsley

At the beginning of 2018 the Incredible Edible Network team received an email from Karen Mower, who had been inspired by the Incredible Edible story, and wanted to know more about setting up a group in her community.

Ian Bocock, our Incredible Edible Regional Facilitator in the north west, got in touch with Karen, and a plan began to fall into place. As well as supporting new and existing Incredible Edible groups, Ian runs Incredible Education based in Salford.

Karen and the team she brought together were really keen to look at how the Incredible Edible model could support health and wellbeing in Knowsley, Merseyside, whilst being led by the wants and needs of the community as they worked together to increase the amount of food grown and eaten in the borough. They have based themselves at Huyton Resource Centre and the Incredible Edible Knowsley project has become a part of Knowsley Community Hub.

On Thursday 16^th August, Ian, along with Pam Warhurst, our founder, people from the Knowsley community, local councillors, local police and representatives from the local public health team, came along to celebrate the beginning of Incredible Edible Knowsley.

Ribbons were cut, tea was drunk and the community was excited to get involved with Karen and the team’s plans to create an exciting project, bringing community, learning and business together to support more local food growing in Knowsley.

Excitingly there was also a pledge from Councillor Graham Morgan to look at how there must be a change in planning regulations in Knowsley to support more growing projects by ensuring anyone building homes in the borough includes the community in the planning procedure and creates growing space in new estates and developments.

With a name like Mower we always knew Karen would bring exciting things to whatever her Incredible Edible group looked like, and moving forwards we’ll be following the team with interest to see how they get on.

If you’d like to get involved with Incredible Edible Knowsley, then get in touch via Facebook. And if you’re interested in setting up an Incredible Edible group where you are, then sign up to the website to access our Getting going guide, which has loads of information and resources to support you putting your Incredible idea into action – just like Karen did.