Farms for City Children
| Formation | 1976 |
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| Founder | |
| Registration no. | 325120 |
| Legal status | Registered charity |
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| Mission | Providing farm experiences to inner-city children |
| Website | www |
Farms for City Children is a UK registered charity which aims to provide experience of farm and countryside life for inner-city children.
In 1976 author Michael Morpurgo and his wife, Clare Morpurgo (the oldest daughter of Sir Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books), established the charity Farms for City Children, with the primary aim of providing children from inner city areas with experience of the countryside. Clare Morpurgo used her legacy after her father's death to found the charity. The programme involves the children spending a week at a countryside farm, during which they take part in purposeful farmyard work.
The first children arrived in January 1976, and 75,000 children have taken part in the scheme since it was set up, and the charity now has three farms in Devon, Gloucestershire and Wales. In 1999 the couple were created Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in recognition of these services to youth.
Michael Morpurgo has described how the relationship between young boy with a stammer who came with Farms for City Children to Devon for a week and a horse on the farm was partly responsible for inspiring the novel War Horse.
The Farms for City Children charity describes itself thus:
"Over the years the formula has changed very little. Simply, children are involved in everything necessary to keep the farms going. They learn hands-on where their food comes from, the importance of caring for animals and the land, and the value of working co-operatively as a team. The rewards are, unusually, non-material and self-generated: children discover an active enjoyment in life and a sense of achievement, the effects of which remain with them long after they have waved the farms goodbye."
A group of 36-40 children from urban primary schools, accompanied by four or five teachers, spend a week on the farm, during which time the children will be split into three groups. The farm jobs are rotated so that each group does each job at least twice, with the result that the second time around the children feel "more like experienced farmers". Jobs include feeding livestock, mucking out, grooming horses and donkeys, assisting at milking time, and working in the vegetable gardens. Naturally, many of the activities are seasonal and can include lambing in spring and making bonfires and pressing apples for juice in the autumn.
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Wikipedia