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Scaynes Hill Village

The first question most of you are probably asking is what is a Community Exchange Market? That is easy to answer because it is an opportunity to swap produce grown in your own garden, with neighbours and local people.

A Community Fruit & Vegetable Swap is a regular event where people come together and share surplus produce in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere.

Community Exchange Markets or Glut Groups

10 June Posted by Sue Morton

Participants bring along their surplus produce on the nominated day and time and everything is laid out on tables. Swaps should be run on an honesty system with people contributing and taking what they want without any monetary value being put on the products. Basically, it is just a way of sharing your glut of courgettes; tomatoes; onions etc and getting something you haven't got in return.

Community Exchange Markets offer a lot more than just the opportunity to swap produce and there are many benefits for the community. I for one know very little about growing vegetables so imagine how much one could learn from talking to others about the best times to plant, where to plant, what to plant and when. The mind boggles at all this free advice right on one's doorstep. There is also a chance of picking up seedlings and plants to sow to get started. And then there is the opportunity to meet new people or catch up with old friends over a nice cup of tea or coffee.

Community Benefits

By being part of a local swap people can: -

• Add variety to their diet and eat fresh good quality food.
• Save money.
• Gain inspiration and ideas about gardening and cooking
• Meet others one wouldn't normally meet
• Make friends in one's local area & feel more connected to the local community.
• Encourage 'organic' (naturally occurring and developing), spontaneous links within local communities, which bridge the differences such as age, background, occupation, professional status and ethnicity which often divide society.
• Reduce isolation and provide a connection point for isolated members of the community, including elderly residents and those newly arrived from other places

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Environmental Benefits

Local Community Fruit & Veg Swaps encourage residents to move towards more sustainable lifestyles in many ways, such as:-

• Cutting food miles
• Reducing food waste, packaging and transportation
• Optimising the use of urban space for sustainability by encouraging garden food production and making it more viable and rewarding
• Encouraging residents to leave their houses on foot, to cultivate friendships and networks within their local area, and to use and enjoy their local open spaces
• Offering an alternative model of exchange, based on sharing, which values intangibles (time, knowledge, skill, friendship) as well as tangible goods (such as fruit, vegetables, seeds, plants, home baking and preserves, and more) without the need to reduce these many dimensions of value to a single currency (i.e. money)
• Encouraging more sustainable practices in home-grown food - for example, methods of designing, shading and irrigating gardens; sharing seeds, cuttings, plants and seedlings, rather than purchasing nursery-grown plants; re-using and sharing materials.

However, not everyone in a village community will have a garden or an established vegetable patch and ideally nobody should be left out. Different groups have dealt with this in different ways. Most groups allow all members of the community to go along on the Exchange Market day. They are then asked to make a donation to the whole group to help fund the market and pay for advertising or to make individual donations to the growers. Alternatively visitors may opt to become a member of the group so that they may get more involved in the swaps and perhaps get started in growing their own fruit and vegetables. If someone does not have a garden they can still be involved by taking away fruits and vegetables and turning them into jams, pickles, sauces, soups etc and taking them along to the next Exchange Market.

• Whilst many community initiatives bring together like-minded people from diverse geographical locations (cities and villages), Community Fruit & Veg Swaps bring together diverse people within a single local area. Strong interaction and networking between residents create safer, stronger communities and better places to live.
• People of diverse perspectives, experiences and generations can talk about different ways of doing things and share ideas, skills and knowledge.

As Jennifer Alden, Chief Executive Officer of Cultivating Community puts it: 'Neighbourhood veggie swaps are a part of an emerging alternative food economy, a larger community food system. As the impacts of climate change and peak oil becomes more extreme its things like growing our own veggies, sharing resources within our communities and generally re-localising that are going to ensure a resilient and food secure future."

• Offering an alternative model of exchange, based on sharing, which values intangibles (time, knowledge, skill, friendship) as well as tangible goods (such as fruit, vegetables, seeds, plants, home baking and preserves, and more) without the need to reduce these many dimensions of value to a single currency (i.e. money)
• Encouraging more sustainable practices in home-grown food - for example, methods of designing, shading and irrigating gardens; sharing seeds, cuttings, plants and seedlings, rather than purchasing nursery-grown plants; re-using and sharing materials.

There are so many benefits to be had through Community Exchange Markets or Glut Groups as some are called in Britain. A Glut Group in Scaynes Hill would be fantastic because it is a village very much divided by a main road, so a community group that cuts across all boundaries can only serve to enhance the quality of our village life and experiences. It would be a group based on common interests such as food, saving money, improving health and well being, strengthening our community bonds, embracing our lonely and isolated neighbours and above all, making new friends and contacts.