The green project is a community group established to assist in the treatment and care of persons suffering from mental health illness of any description and members of any disadvantaged or socially excluded group in need of rehabilitation, mainly of the rural community, by the provision of facilities for work like experience and vocational skills training. The training provided aims at helping people to reinforce their ‘skills for life’ and re-gain their practical vocational skills in gardening and horticulture, strengthening their confidence and providing them with the appropriate transferable skills to increase their chances of employability and help them to re-integrate into the community. The project also includes a community composting scheme for bio-degradable green garden waste.

The project is innovative in that it is a user-led community group in which people with mental health problems, unemployed people and other socially disadvantaged rural groups of people become empowered to make decisions about training, employability and environmental issues. This is new in relation to previous practice in the region. In addition, the project also offers a new approach to mental health recovery which is occupational therapeutic activities in the form of training and practical work, such as gardening and horticulture. All these activities are developed within the framework of a novel form of organisation, e.g. social enterprise with quality assurance standards, social outcomes and recovery indicators.

People with mental health problems and those socially vulnerable groups at risk of becoming mentally ill will find in this project an opportunity to break the isolation in which many of them live and become involved in a project where they can have an input. The aim of the project is to create a focal point for the community, not only by providing a pleasing visual transformation of the environment, but also by working together towards a common goal. The development of the project brings together a variety of community groups, providing opportunities to the multiple ethnic minority groups that presently live in the region and fostering renewed bonds between all cultures and ethnicities.