Under the broad heading of ‘social responsibility’ we are pretty active, often in ways that we don’t publicise. There are two key areas:

Education  - we see ourselves as a learning resource to be used by our customers. We have periodically hosted school visits to our packhouses, our orchard and our Growers’ Group farms. For example, last week we had 3 groups of students from the Marches School in Oswestry, Shropshire coming to us and learning about organic farming and food production as part of a special collapsed timetable week. If you are involved in education and see an opening with us for your group, do contact either Mike Hamilton or Des Walker to see how we may be able to help out. We feel that we are ideally suited to KS2 age children but we have run the gamut of ages from pre-school tots up to university students.

Charity Work – we are keen to increase the amount of charity work/support that we do. For some time now our Shropshire site has been a supporter of the Walled Garden Project in Shifnal, which is a horticultural and rural skills centre which helps young people with learning difficulties. We provide them with a complimentary box of fruit every week and help them out with other one off activities. In addition to this link up, we are looking for a charity to support from our Herefordshire site. Do you know a charity that might fit in well with our ethos in that part of the country? If so, contact Mike or Des to put your case forward. If there are any other activities that may fall under the social responsibility umbrella that you think we may like to hear about don’t hesitate to get in touch and let us know about them. We can’t promise to get involved with every idea that comes our way but we’ll certainly give them all careful consideration.