Yellow Door - Help us grow our garden

With your support we are creating a natural, trauma informed green space, reviving our current garden to the rear of our premises in central Southampton. Our stunning garden design below will enable our service users of all ages to feel a deeper connection with nature supporting their recovery from abuse. It is our hope that this will become a calming, wellbeing space for our service users, staff and volunteers to use.

Evidence from research suggests high-quality nature spaces support good mental health and recovery from trauma. Sadly these spaces are not available equally to everyone in the UK. We know that many of our service users will not be able to access the benefits of nature in their daily lives.  Research suggests people living in urban areas without gardens are less likely than rural residents to connect with nature and that for some social groups, for example women, younger people, Disabled people and people from ethnic minorities, public nature spaces may feel inaccessible or less enjoyable because they don’t feel safe – from the risk of physical harm, sexual harassment, hate crime or discrimination. For many of these groups, this inequality has a greater impact due to these access barriers and because they are the groups within our population most at risk of mental health problems. We want to ensure our service users are able to access the benefit of nature in their recovery work with us. Our new trauma informed garden will be accessible with a new entrance to the garden and paths throughout.
 
We are fundraising to enable these plans to come to life. Our design was co developed with our service users, staff and volunteers at Yellow Door. We hope to also fundraise for a garden ‘pod’ providing an additional, all weather, safe and calming room for our service users. This project will help us in our plan to become sustainable as a service for future generations, for example using solar generated electricity to power a new garden Pod and contribute to reducing our energy costs - savings that will be reinvested in our core service provision. The garden will include a variety of areas that will engage children, young people, adults and families, for example; an area for planting, for play and exploring. The sensory planting palette we have planned will include a ‘shady woodland’ area and sunny borders with native species and wild flower planting to encourage wildlife and pollinators.
 
Please contact us if you have ideas for fundraising to support our plans and please do donate what you can to support us in this way.