Hello & Welcome..

I thought our first blog post should give a little insight to what we’ve been working on and explain a little more about what we’ll be doing over the next coming months, we may have been live for only 3 days but the work we have already put into Project Zero @ The Farm started around 3 months ago.

For those of you who don’t know us, I’m Hannah and I’m currently on maternity leave from my medical administration job looking after our 6 month old, Elsie. My Husband, Richard, is a driving instructor and has his own driving school, he works most days from 8am to 6pm. Richard also has 3 children, Sophia, (9), Megan (6) & Thomas (3) who are with us regularly, to say this makes finding the time challenging is an understatement however we’ve found the time and managed well so far so I have every confidence we can continue to do this.

Richard has given a lot of his time over the years to youth charity volunteering, he stopped doing this around 4 years ago and it is something he misses dearly and is desperate to get back into. I have a huge passion for the outdoors, animals and raising awareness on important issues. Based on this, we decided we needed to create something that incorporates all of that, as well as giving back to local schools, communities, businesses and beyond, and so Project Zero @ The Farm was born.

Our idea was thought up after some conversations on how we want to change our life and better it for our children, as well as better it for every person on this earth whilst giving something back and raising awareness on a huge issue, sustainability. Why sustainability?, I’ll be covering that in another blog post over the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for that.

Since then, we’ve spent many evenings and weekends brainstorming our ideas. We put all this down on paper and after hours of research and development, we finally had a fantastic idea and started to create our website and social media platforms. We wanted our website to be completely transparent so that people know exactly what we are doing every step of the way as well as knowing what they are donating to, how much we need for the different stages and exactly what we plan to do. Over time as the project grows, we will be able to update this further and expand on different areas, we hope to include a full timeline on the website a little further down the line which will have step by step details on what we will be doing when. There will also be regular blog posts to update you all on our news.

So what's our next step?

Well.. we need to complete our charity application and get it sent off, some of you might think this is pretty straightforward however this is actually pretty complicated and there is so much information we need to prepare before we can even start the forms! We are applying for a Charity Incorporated Organisation (CIO) and there are countless policies that we have to create, safeguarding and health and safety to name a couple of the more boring ones. We also have to complete DBS checks for all trustees, set up bank accounts, gift aid status and so much more. There is so much information that I feel it will feel like a massive accomplishment just to get the application in let alone get the charity accepted. But we will do it and we will get accepted, we just need to focus and keep chipping away at bits as we go. We also have to be very thorough and detailed when filling in our charity application, the charity commission require an extensive plan, detailed timeline and much more for them to accept our application. Once we’ve become a registered charity, it opens up so many more avenues that we can go down in terms of getting our details out there and raising money, even social media influencers with interest in sustainability can help us spread the word.

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How can you help us right now?

Right now we need to spread the word and get our website and social media pages out to as many people as possible. Being seen is our biggest challenge currently. Our social media links are at the bottom of this page and on our website. We would be hugely grateful if you would like and follow us on all social media (Facebook, Instagram X and TikTok) and share our page to your friends and family. We would also be so amazingly grateful if you could donate on our Just Giving page, as little as £2 would help us, if 160,000 people donated £5 each then we would reach our end goal! I've added a button below that links to our Just Giving if you'd like to donate. Starting from scratch is the hardest part, once we have some land we can start to generate an income and apply for grants, keep your eyes peeled for another blog post with some more information on this. We’d also appreciate any advice or guidance you can give us that would help, if you have any ideas, please get in touch with us via our email thefarm@projectzero.org.uk. Whether its some advice on our social media, fundraising ideas etc, we’d love to hear from you! No advice is too much or too little. We’ve even been informed about professional fundraisers which is something we didn’t even think about.

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So as you’ve read, we’ve got a lot to be getting on with and we’re excited to get things ticked off our list. Keep a look our for some more exciting updates over the coming weeks and Thank you all for your support so far.

Hannah x