Can you help at ‘Brad’s Pit’ – Lewes FC’s new community garden?

Can you help at ‘Brad’s Pit’ – Lewes FC’s new community garden?

Lewes FC’s recently-signed midfielder Bradley Pritchard has started a community garden and allotment at the Dripping Pan and is looking for volunteers to help it thrive. Co-director Karen Dobres explains more.

Hello from Lewes Football Club!

We met up with some fantastic TTL people recently and we heard more about your mission to “work together as a local community and find brilliant and inspiring ways to reduce our contribution to global warming, manage our impact on the planet – and help our town to thrive.” As a 100% community owned, not-for-profit, football club, we feel exactly the same way. We are all about using football as an engine for societal change.

In 2017, the club caused shockwaves in football when we became the first pro or semi-pro club on the planet to assign equal resources (including playing budgets) to both men’s and women’s teams. As the first and only gender-equal football club in the world Lewes attracted attention from both national and international media, going on to receive an award from UN Women UK for ‘bold and decisive action in the field of gender equality’. We have started a debate in football that simply did not exist before.

And a year or so ago, we became the first football club in the UK to publicly state that it would not accept sponsorship or advertising money from gambling companies. In our view, they are using football to normalise betting in young people, planting seeds of untold anguish and even suicide.

Ten years ago, we installed 180 solar panels on the roof of our South Stand, paid for by local people investing and each getting a financial return.

But we mostly want to tell you about our latest scheme and ask you if you’d like to get involved: Recently, a player called Bradley Pritchard joined the men’s team, attracted by the club’s ethos. We found out that he had previously started a Community Garden in Lewisham, and this rapidly led to the idea of having our own space, inside the ground, where we could ‘grow good food and relationships together’.

Six weeks on and “Brad’s Pit” as it has been named by fans, is a reality, in the south-east corner of the Dripping Pan, in sight of the pitch. Tomatoes, chillies, chard, spinach, lettuce, cauliflower, beetroot, cucumber are all being cultivated. Keeping it all watered and looked after though is a big job. We have a kind of rota going, but we could really do with more volunteers from the town to help out.

Does that sound like you? Hope so. If it does, please contact Bradley on bradley@sportingway.co.uk