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Community Greening
Community Greening supports tenant engagement and participation, facilitates wellbeing and skills development, and helps beautify the look and feel of social housing areas.
Community Greening
The Community Greening program is a partnership between Homes NSW and the Botanic Gardens of Sydney, which operates across NSW. The program is available to social housing tenants and local communities.
Community Greening is funded through Future Directions, Service Improvement Initiatives until June 2026. The Botanic Gardens of Sydney use funds to employ an outreach team of five horticultural/educational officers, including and Aboriginal Officer to support the delivery and maintenance of tenant led projects across NSW.
Community Greening support social housing tenants to create and maintain community gardens and engage in greening activities.
Across NSW, abandoned back-lots, wasteland and balconies have been converted into areas growing vegetables, fruit, and flowers.
New garden sites can be identified and developed in consultation with the Community Greening team and with landowners’ consent.
Benefits
By offering a range of activities and attracting community engagement and participation, community gardens have:
- facilitated and increased tenant participation in community life
- encouraged interaction and stronger communication between tenants of diverse ages and backgrounds
- provided an outlet for access to healthy exercise and a healthy food source
- allowed tenants to acquire a range of vocational skills in gardening, planning, teamwork, and decision making
- given tenants a genuine sense of pride and accomplishment, and
- improved people’s understanding and appreciation of their physical environment and heritage.
Community Greening partners
Greening projects are undertaken with a range of local partners such as community housing providers and Aboriginal community housing providers, local Councils and others.
The Botanic Gardens of Sydney and its partners also support Community Greening activities targeted to children and young people.
Community Greening supporters
Some partners that support the program include:
- VegePod
- Oasis Horticulture
- Alpine Nurseries
- Eden Gardens
- WaterUps
- Northcote Pottery
- Yates