Become a supporting member
Community Apothecary has now been active since 2018, a bit more established each year and bringing together interconnected circles of people, plants, land and care. We continue to be excited about the potential and the joy of this work for ecosystem and human health!
We have until this year been core funded by Shed in the form of the Necessity project. This was a supportive, unrestricted funder model that enabled us to build our organisation from our first years of founding. This fund has come to an end as of mid-2026. We have also received other pots of money from the National Lottery Community Fund, The National Community Gardening Scheme, the Coop Community Fund, Groundwork & the People’s Postcode Lottery, all of which have enabled us to pay for labour, materials & sustenance costs of our gardens work and gone towards supporting the learning activity at the Hornbeam Centre in Walthamstow. The unrestricted funding we had each year since 2019 from Necessity also met organisational costs of operating as a CIC (community interest company or social enterprise) - business registration, HMRC tax & accountancy, insurance, DBS, training.
With the closing of the Shed fund we are left with a shortfall. So we’re now in a position of needing to strengthen our fundraising and sustainability approaches to support our project continuing.
Income streams other than grant funding come through our training offerings - workshops, courses, herb walks, consultation/advice - and sales of our remedies made with locally-cultivated herbs. We are working on plans to develop and enrich these strands to make our model more financially multi-faceted and resilient. Ultimately, we want to make herbal medicine accessible to anyone who wants it or needs it.
What we would like to ask and invite from you is any support you are able to, and want to give!
You might be someone who takes part in our activities, or who is a bit further away but likes to engage with our work. You might want to support local health/environment oriented activity to contribute to your community and have the resource to do so. You might just want us to keep going!
We are aware that many of us are not able to do this, but if you feel you are and you would be up for supporting, we will appreciate it hugely! We have set up this membership page where you can choose a one-off or fixed monthly or annual supporters contribution.
What your membership helps us to provide:
Continuing our mission to bring back herbal medicine as a normal and accepted mode of healthcare, in a way that supports local people and the natural world and is interwoven into our communities’ everyday lives.
Weekly gardening sessions where we teach people how to grow medicinal herbs in urban gardens, on allotments and a broad range of community growing space spaces.
Creating space where people can simply be and exist on living land, in the presence of herbs and the multitude of beings that we share the city with - space where people can connect and find healing with and for one another in community.
Continued development of our apothecary, medicines and medicine making sessions, gardens, learning opportunities, etc. and wider rippling out effects of this for greater ecosystem and human health and care in the context of systems that are increasingly destructive and harmful.
Please note that subscribing as a member will help us to continue to do the work described above, but is not essential to taking part in our activities. Please do so if you see the benefit in our work, would like to support it and can afford to, but don't see this membership as a barrier to participating in our activities.
Other ways to support our work include:
Purchase our community-crafted remedies from the Hornbeam on a Wednesday (currently 1st or 3rd of the month).
Buying a ticket to attend one of our workshops (including one-off workshops and our regular workshops at the Hornbeam - currently 1st or 3rd Wednesday of each month).
Buy a plant from our nursery at our Mulberry Close garden in Chingford (open every Thursday or at one of our open days - see upcoming events).