tces east London school garden enterprise trip
Last Tuesday, students from East London School embarked on a successful trip to Nomura International (a Japanese bank in the city) as part of their amazing grow wild project.
This was created by Mark, the mentor ecologist, at ELS who arranges an opportunity every year for pupils to sell plants and other garden produce (jams, chutney, honey) that they have grown to raise funds for a cause of their choice. Each year they grow an abundance of flowers, fruit and vegetable plants for the school garden and surplus plants are sold as part of their enterprise project.
To prepare for this year’s sale, students priced up all the produce they had grown and labelled the plants in preparation for the sale beforehand. On the day, pupils were given a sales market stall on Nomura’s level 6 restaurant from 12pm-2pm where they engaged with staff and sold their produce. The pupils gained valuable experience of dealing with customers face to face homing in on their customer service skills, learning to operate a till and card reader and handling cash payments. They also got to see what it is like to work in a busy corporate environment which had 4500 staff!
After a successful day, an incredible £300 was raised from the produce sales in just 2 hours! These funds are going to be used this autumn to fund a community outreach project creating pollinator habitat in Victoria park.
At the weekend Mark also took the student’s plants along to a sale at Montague gardens as part of open gardens weekend and sold an additional £200 of plants bringing the total funds to £500!
We look forward to seeing more of the amazing work Mark and the students at ELS do in the near future.