Residents work in horticultural partnership

 14/03/2012 

 

As part of our community investment strategy - our commitment to investing in your homes and estates - we were pleased to launch our horticulture and landscape gardening partnership with Yorkshire Housing.

Accent Foundation Managing Director Claire Stone and the Chief Executive of Yorkshire Housing Mervyn Jones launched the partnership at Yorkshire Housing’s Ashfield Garden Centre, Thornton Road, Bradford in March.

We have taken on 12 apprentices aged 16 – 19, and several are residents or family members of residents. With training and mentoring, we’ll help them learn landscaping skills, under the watchful eye of our supervisor and teams of caretakers. It’s a really good opportunity for them, as our caretakers already do landscaping around your homes and on your estates as part of their job. The apprentices will do day-to-day landscaping work and improvements, and get involved with community projects.

In the future, we hope to add to the service. We want to give our apprentices experience in helping vulnerable or disabled people who cannot manage their gardens, and we will look at providing a landscaping service on our longer term empty homes.
 
One of the apprentices, Tim, said he was really enjoying working with the caretaking team and was grateful for the chance to start an apprenticeship.

You are invited to our event on Saturday 21 July to see the work the apprentices are doing. You can make your own hanging baskets and there will be free activities for children. If you’d like to come, please email or ring Emma Sharp, emma.sharp@accentgroup.org, 01274 728 377 for more details. Everyone is welcome. We look forward to seeing you.