The Empanda Community Garden will soon be ship-shape and ready for planting vegetables thanks to help from the Community Payback scheme.
Community Payback is a scheme that allows offenders the opportunity to make amends for their crimes in their local communities by carrying out unpaid work on local projects such as re-decorating community centres, tidying public spaces and removing litter.
Community Payback is a part of a Community Order sentence, passed by Crown and Magistrates Court in England and Wales. It can also form part of a Suspended Sentence Order. Offenders can be sentenced to between 40 and 300 hours of unpaid work in the community, which must be carried out in their spare time. For those who are in employment, this could mean working at weekends or during their annual leave. Offenders who are unemployed can work three to four days a week.
Bryan Foster from Community Payback met with Sally Hanlin earlier today to assess the type of work needed to get the allotment to a stage when it would be ready for sowing seeds and planting vegetables. He told Sally that this was exactly the type of project that offenders enjoyed spending time on because it was for such a good cause and, when finished, would enable our day care customers and some of the adults with a learning difficulty that we support in the community, to participate in gardening activities.
Work is due to start in March to erect a perimeter fence, prepare beds, tidy paths and dig over the land in readiness for seed-sowing and vegetable planting. We very much look forward to seeing the new look allotment ready to start producing vegetables for the day centre café.
