FRESH PINTS AND FRANK WORDS WITH ST WERBURGHS CITY FARM

We like to think of St Werburghs City Farm as the inception project of Brewed to Give. Seeing how they flipped £4.5k of cost-price beer into £27,000 at their 2019 Farm Summer Fair was a light blub moment for our MD Sam Burrows. As well as bringing people together for a banging party in the paddock, the Farm Fair demonstrated how a community event could raise serious funds for charities holding up our city.

Roll forward to May 2023, we launched our community giving initiative pledging to donate 2% of every brewery sale to good causes across the city. As part of our annual budget, we offer cash donations but wherever possible, we want to give our beer, equipment and time so that other charities can do what St Werburghs did, and flip our support into 4 to 5 times its cost value. That’s why we called it BREWED TO GIVE!

Since we launched Brewed to Give, we have donated beer and equipment for 15 separate events, raising in excess of £70,000 for the Farm alone. Now, we don’t ask for onerous reporting or detailed specifics on what our donated beer has helped to fund, because we believe that's just wasting the charity's time when it could be used elsewhere (more on that later) but to give you an idea of our shared IMPACT, £70,000 is equivalent to:

• 1 full-time Youth Worker to support and empower 150 young people over 2 years OR
• 150 Horticultural therapy sessions for 15 adults with care and support needs OR
• 3 years-worth of insurance cover, 1,500 bottles of hand soap and 10,000 toilet rolls. Not very glamorous but essential for free-to-access open farm opportunities.

We think that Brewed to Give is an innovative, honest and impactful way to give back to our city, but on its own, it is not enough. Our charity sector is facing major challenges including the rising cost of living, which heightens the demand for services, increases the cost of delivering consistent, quality and person-centric services and decreases funding opportunities and success. Alongside this, charities are operating in an environment where inequalities are widening and marginalised communities are feeling more disconnected.

We caught up with Jenny Howard Coles, the Director of St Werburghs City Farm to hear about their incredible work and how important your pint is.

“We're pretty much doing the same range of things that we were doing when we set out in 1980 – albeit at a much larger scale - because although the area has changed, the broad sense of people needing to connect with nature and themselves, and for communities to come together in a shared space to improve their wellbeing hasn’t changed at all. Its only grown”.

Within their 5 acres of green space (not including 13 acres of surrounding allotments), the Farm runs a range of anchor services including: animal care and therapeutic horticulture sessions for adults with learning disabilities; volunteering opportunities for adults experiencing mental-ill health or loneliness; alternative education for young people experiencing barriers to mainstream education; and outdoor play opportunities for neurodivergent children or those with limited access to green spaces because of poverty, deprivation, or other challenges. They also offer school trips, school holiday activities, corporate team days, seasonal events, site hire, and they have an award-winning Café, a playground and we haven’t even mentioned the livestock Farm  – open 7 days a week and free to visit.

Jen continued, “Much of what we offer is targeted at the key groups who need us most, but we also recognise the need for the entire community to have access to spaces and places that are free, welcoming and open-to-all. That’s why it’s really important that we remain free to access”.

No one needs to convince team BBF of the importance of creating spaces where people can come together to connect, share, listen and celebrate. Hit up our IMPACT REPORT for more on PUBS AS HUBS and PEOPLE POWERED PINTS. For St Werburghs City Farm, “Community is about belonging. It is not really anything to do with your age or where you come from, or whether you've fallen on hard times or whether you're absolutely flying. It's about feeling like you are part of something”.

The Farm works directly with close to 10,000 people per year, and welcomes around 60,000 visitors. Turns out it costs around £800,000 a year to provide this level of community support, across 4 different sites employing 38 team members (around 16 FTE). As a charity, the Farm secures half of their income through grant applications, however Jen went on to describe how unstable the grant landscape has become, with one funder saying they received 300 applications for just four grants. Jen puts this down to a rise in need, “Less charities receive public sector income and the cost of living crisis means their trading activities are struggling. As a result, more charities are looking to fund things through trusts and foundations which means that grant programmes are heavily oversubscribed in a way that they were not, even compared to a couple of years ago”.

The other half of their income, around £400,000, is secured from a mix of streams including: education and day support contracts, membership and donations, hiring their spaces, including Boiling Wells Woodland, licencing their café, managing the allotments and hosting seasonal, outdoor events including the Farm Summer Fair.

Even if you are successful with a grant application, the funds donated may be restricted to a specific activity and sometimes you just need the cash to pay for toilet roll, heating a classroom, urgent tree work, replacing a broken window or paying your admin team. That’s why raising unrestricted funds through fundraising events, donations and business support is so vital for charities like the Farm.

Jen went on to say, “Bristol Beer Factory are front and centre in terms of our supporters from the business community, (yes, we are blushing) but there are so many ways that others could support us." We asked Jen for 3 ways Bristol businesses could help:

1. We would rather have a long-term partnership where we can build a relationship over time, co-create opportunities for your team and our community and celebrate a multi-year unrestricted donation. This is much more valuable than a top ticket, one-off donation that may not meet the needs of our community.
2. When you're interacting with a charity, remember that our time is precious. Every hour we spend with you is an hour not spent delivering our services or fundraising to deliver a service. 80% of current business interaction doesn’t result in a donation or a working partnership.
3. Choose us! We have some really fantastic services, from spaces for hire for team meeting, off-site events and staff parties, to tailored team volunteer days. Where else can you take a pit stop from your meeting and walk amongst the veg beds and go stroke the goats? Or if your business offers a service from HR, IT, legal services, architects, tree surgeons, plumbers, electricians etc, offer it to a charity like us, at the same standard you provide to paying customers, but for free.

“The charity sector is being encouraged to be more enterprising, but making enterprising decisions can run the risk of prioritising the things that you can make money from over what is needed by the people you support. When it comes our community, we should not be making transactional decisions with people's well-being. We keep people out of GP surgeries, we keep people out of psychiatric wards, we keep people off repeat medication, and we probably keep people out of the criminal justice system. But that's not costed and it's not funded. We want to do what we're good at. We can't replace health services and we can't replace schools, nor would we want to. But what we can do is support people to have a sense of belonging, to have purpose, to have skills, confidence and a community where their can feel seen and heard and recognise that they have a lot to offer. But this needs to be funded properly and delivered according to our values and our standards. We cannot do this on a shoestring”.

For Bristol Beer Factory, we know that giving back to our city is the right thing to do as a business and as a team. It’s a pledge of 2% of our total brewery sales and a commitment to raise up communities. “Every keg, cask or can leaving our yard gives something back to the city,” said Sam. “BREWED TO GIVE is about connection, fairness and doing our bit for Bristol. We’re not just brewing beer, we’re helping brew a fairer city, and every pint counts.”

But our city needs more which is why we are inviting other Bristol-focused businesses to collaborate with us, learn from us, or talk to us so they can make their own commitment to their community.

In the meantime, head to the pub and buy yourself a fresh BBF pint. We will take care of the rest. Together, we can RAISE UP OUR COMMUNITY!