The London Freedom Seed Bank network is a London-wide network of seed savers, community gardeners and food justice activists. The steering group is made up of voluntary members. We welcome new members to the steering group, and hold an AGM once a year.
The current steering group is:
Charlotte Dove has been involved with the urban food growing movement in London since 2008. As a community gardener and garden educator, she’s worked growing food-to-sell and teaching horticulture to schoolchildren and volunteers. Currently, she’s based at Sydenham Garden in South London, where she runs therapeutic gardening sessions for people recovering from poor mental health. She was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship in 2015 to undertake a 10-week research trip to seed saving ventures in North America and Canada. Her motivation for undertaking this research project was to understand how community models can make a meaningful impact in protecting seed diversity and how this fledgling movement can best be supported in the UK. Learnings from the study have been integrated in the way the London Freedom Seed Bank operates today. To learn more about Charlotte’s research project and read the report in full: https://seeddiversity.wordpress.com
Helene Schulze is a writer and editor on food, agriculture and social justice. She is particularly interested in agroecology, (urban) food justice and the potential of art-science collaborations for building more resilient, just and joyful food futures. She is also regional coordinator for Southeast England at the Seed Sovereignty Programme and communications officer at the Food Ethics Council. Helene met the Freedom Seed Bank team whilst writing her Masters dissertation on community seed saving at the University of Oxford in 2017. She has been a director since April 2018 and grows in the Garden of Earthly Delights, her back garden as well as every free windowsill, workbench and shelf indoors. She tweets @HeleneSCSchulze
Richard Galpin is an artist, community gardener and community organiser. He founded the Alberta Fruit Commons in South London which uses the growing and sharing of fruit as way of building community resilience. Richard is co-founder and project manager for the Kennington Chartist Project, which celebrates Kennington Park’s place in the history of protest and democracy. He is vice-chair of trustees for Walworth Garden, a South London Charity whose mission is to change lives through horticultural training and therapy. From his small backyard in South London Richard is slowly breeding ‘The Bloody Marvel‘, a new variety of red speckled lettuce, bred for its resilience to London’s challenging growing conditions. twitter: @rgalpinstudio
Katie Dow is a an academic at the University of Cambridge, based in the Department of Sociology. She researches connections between reproductive and environmental concerns and activism and is the author of Making a Good Life (Princeton University Press, 2016). She first came into contact with LFSB while researching seed-saving in London and joined the steering group in 2020. Katie has been gardening for many years and grows food from self-saved and open-pollinated seeds with her family on their allotment in Walthamstow. She also founded the seed-sharing project, Cornucopia Seed Redistribution Project (@cornucopiaseed). @katieldow
Anna Clow recently joined the London Freedom Seed Bank, volunteering to help with the tech and infrastructure of the seed bank. She has a background in computing and currently works as a technician in a digital fabrication lab. She is new to seed saving practices but brings interdisciplinary skills in computing and making to the LFSB, and is helping to design and grow the seed bank database, seed bank model and collaborate on anything else tech-y.
Laura Moore has a background in community building within the sustainability space and has a particular interest in exploring ways of bringing people together to incite societal and environmental change. Laura has joined London Freedom Seed Bank to support the growth of our community network. Since moving to London, she has been growing at home in her garden as well as volunteering on a regenerative farm in Greenwich.