Blossom in Whythenshawe Park
Health through activity
Blossom, health through activity is based in Wythenshawe Park in South Manchester and offers green wellbeing workshops and volunteering opportunities in and around the beautiful horticultural centre. Blossom promotes health of people and the planet through positive engagement, teaching cooking and food growing and through seasonal activities that reconnect us to the food we eat.
The Blossom team are welcoming and inclusive. Sessions are structured across the week including the weekend. In the summer months, they offer ‘In the night garden’ sessions to encourage people with work or caring responsibilities to get involved.
Blossom run a range of volunteer sessions to help support the tropical planting in the horticultural centre, show people how to grow vegetables and deliver themed workshops, such as foraging, herbal first aid, and physic gardens. They even offer taster allotments, about the size of a dinner table, as a chance to learn food growing skills in a supportive environment. They teach people how to cook from scratch using seasonal produce and share how to cook in an energy-efficient way.
Blossom offers support for people locally and allows an outlet for community and socialising, an outlet to be creative, an outlet to connect with food, and the bigger issues that food intersects with including food and fuel poverty. The team are committed to engaging and supporting people to build confidence to make lasting change, to become more sustainable and become positively engaged in the climate agenda discourse.
Blossom also runs collaborative projects with local institutions to be able to connect more people to the food system. Blossom is currently collaborating with Manchester University plant science department. They also host corporate social responsibility events to engage and connect local businesses, organisations, and institutions to the food system.
Blossom experiences first-hand accounts of how the pressures on the food system and people’s livelihoods. Blossom reports how people’s concerns with food system and supply have changed and evolved over time. Volunteers now raise and discuss food security and sustainability as real and affecting issues. People are recognising and experiencing the first-hand effects of Covid, Brexit and global heating. Community food projects are so well placed to talk about these issues and also show small-scale solutions to the global issues in our food system.
