St James Village Orchard - Documents and Documentation

Raising support and money to be able to plan and plant a new orchard and then maintain it can take a lot of work and involve a lot of documentation.

Most worthwhile sources of funds will want to see a well-thought out and viable proposition, assurance that the project will be competently, successfully managed to completion, and evidence that the wider 'outcomes' and impact have been considered. Some will also require that the management team have formal policies in place covering the project's interaction with the public in all its guises. Understanding, or finding guidance on, what these should contain can a be time-consuming exercise in its own right.

With this experience in mind, we have provided here examples of some documents that we needed to produce. This information is provided only for interest, ideas and suggestions for anyone considering a similar initiative: it is not necessarily kept up-to-date or relevant to circumstances significantly different from those we encountered.

While you are welcome to use this material, an acknowledgement would be appreciated. Please note that the St James Village Orchard Project accepts no responsibility for use of any of the material by others. Your circumstances may be different, and you should consider taking appropriate professional advice where necessary.

We had support from many organisations including The National Trust and its Orchard Network initiative. The latter asked us about our approach to fundraising for inclusion in a case study. As a convenient summary of how we went about this, it is provided here (PDF).

You can find the Orchard Network at orchardnetwork.org.uk.

Many of our grant applications covered similar topics. One of the most comprehensive was for Local Food and our draft responses to their key questions are included here as examples (PDF).

We have also included below examples of some of the various supporting documents that we were asked to produce :