We are raising funds for Thrive, a charity that uses therapeutic gardening to help people living with disability or ill health to reach their goals and improve their lives.
Based near Reading, Thrive also has centres in Battersea Park, London and Kings Heath Park, Birmingham. They were working with around 350 client gardeners, aged from 14 to 84, but the Coronavirus has meant that therapeutic gardening sessions have had to stop. This is having a big impact on the clients and also on the charity as their income has also stopped. The charity now has just a handful of staff working from home to keep the communications with clients, volunteers, staff and supporters going and to find ways to bring in much needed funded when so many fundraising events have also been cancelled.
For the gardens and the therapeutic programmes, however, there is no ‘working at home’ or digitally enabled alternative - the gardens are going untended as the charity cannot afford to pay staff to look after the gardens whilst not running client programmes. For many of the client gardeners, not being able to come to Thrive is a huge issue; returning to find their plots and much-loved areas of the gardens overrun by weeds and withering from lack of water could have a significant negative impact on their mental health.
The charity really wants to bring a couple of staff in each of the 3 centres back off furlough to put in place a proper care plan for the gardens, that can be managed by local volunteers.
Please help us to raise funds to ensure that Thrive can continue to offer a really positive experience to its client gardeners when they are able to return to their gardens.

I'll be breaking my 260 km into daily chunks of 10 or 12 km with a 'rest day' of 2 km once a week.  What I can't complete in an hour on the road, I'll do on the treadmill!