We are Root Connections! A community space and market garden situated in Stratton-on-the-Fosse in rural Somerset. We are looking to raise funds to complete work on our community hub, enabling us to expand our offering to our beneficiaries and the wider community.

Our purpose is to help and support people affected by rural homelessness, as well as other vulnerable adults. We do this by providing a place for our beneficiaries and volunteers to connect, gain skills, improve their physical and mental health, and help them to avoid isolation by building community. Until now, we've solely done this through our 2-acre garden, where our volunteers work the land alongside our beneficiaries.

P.G., one of our beneficiaries, recently stated:

"Root Connections has given purpose back to my life. I am able to use my 40 years of horticultural skills and experience at Roots. It allows me to reconnect with community and it has restored my self worth."

By completing our long sought after community hub, we will provide our beneficiaries, and the wider community, with a purpose-built indoor space where we intend to run workshops and community groups that will enhance wellbeing, tackling mental health issues, social isolation and more.

Examples of groups we wish to provide include: weekly coffee mornings, knit and natter, supper club, men's mental health 'talk club', art therapy, book club and more.

We are so close to completion! However, we have to ensure the accessibility to the community hub for volunteers and beneficiaries with varying levels of mobility. Therefore, we need to build a new access road, car park with disabled parking bays, and a disabled ramp into the community hub. We also need to finalise the internal space with some final carpentry and durable flooring.

These last stages will enable us to finally open the site and move forward with our mission to become a fully-operational community space.

The aim is to secure funding and open the Community Hub as soon as possible, therefore please share with anyone in your network and anything donated is deeply appreciated.