The Community Garden movement is about people and their communities. It is about people using land creatively to fulfil a variety of needs.

The benefits of Community Gardens extend far into the communities which they serve. They include:

• Aiding in community cohesion and understanding.
• Providing an opportunity for training, income generation, volunteering and learning.
• Rebuilding the community by encouraging greening and environmental improvement activities.
• Improving people's social skills and employability through their experience of community management and training.
• Providing a valuable tool for multicultural development, disability work and mixing young and older people.
• Improving physical health through exercise that has a purpose.
• Improving mental health through stress reduction and confidence building.
• Reducing the effects of poverty for those who can grow their own food.
• Encouraging wildlife and local biodiversity.
• Providing a safe and secure meeting place and community leisure facility.

Community Gardens contribute enormously to the social, physical, economic and environmental well being of communities; however this contribution has been greatly undervalued both locally and nationally.

This conference believes that steps need to be taken urgently and at a local, regional, national and international level to redress this situation. They include:

• A unified voice to represent Community Gardens.
• Raising public awareness of their value.
• Better sharing of skills, services and knowledge expressed through support for networking.
• A genuine national open spaces policy to meet local needs with the emphasis on qualityas well as quantity of open space. We need to work closely with other organisations in order to achieve this.
• Legislation or government guidance to ensure protection of Community Garden sites and encourage the creation of new ones.
• Development of an accessible and well signposted advice service.
• Access to affordable training that meets local needs.
• Recognition of local people's rights to determine the future of their community's open space. The term 'brown field site' is a misnomer; community regeneration cannot be achieved through indiscriminate development of land in urban areas.
• Seeking funding to achieve these steps.

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