Volunteering: a problem and an opportunity?
Volunteering: a problem and an opportunity?
Room to Grow: Horticulture and Volunteer Labour, by Joanna Pidcock
Whenever the issue of pay and volunteering has come up, gardeners and horticulturists get very impassioned about the subject. Whether that has been in posts over on @decolonisethegarden or at in-person talks, it’s been clear to me that people feel strongly about the issue of pay, or lack thereof, in the industry. Perhaps unsurprising given how poorly paid in general the industry is, as well as its reliance on volunteer labour. The impact of this on accessibility and therefore diversity cannot be underestimated. To what extent is access to horticulture (gardening ranks fifth in the least ethnically diverse UK professions) impacted by pay, amongst other factors? Choosing to pursue a career in horticulture that one might love but which pays a pittance or nothing at all is a privilege not everyone can afford. Free or cheap horticultural labour can work to make an already unequal system even more unfair. Here Joanna, who volunteers on a North London farm, shares her take on it.
Room to Grow: Horticulture and Volunteer Labour, by Joanna Pidcock
From the smallest community growing plots, to immense National Trust gardens, horticulture is powered by volunteer labour. Working the earth is a varied thing - some tasks require considerable skill and knowledge, and others only physical stamina. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do all the things that could be done in a garden, and jobs are constantly being put off, consigned to an indeterminate future day when there might finally be time. This being the case, it isn’t surprising that most gardens need to supplement their staff with volunteers, willing hands to dig and carry so that trained gardeners and growers can take cuttings, propagate, plan.
I am one of these volunteers. For almost a year now, I have been working at GROW, a farm in North London attached to a school. On six acres of green belt clay, we grow vegetables that are used in school meals and sold to restaurants, and flowers for some local florists. The kids at the school take lessons on the farm as part of their curriculum, and viscerally, tangibly experience where their food comes from. There’s a little stall on a Thursday afternoon selling produce and flowers to the community, and a veg box scheme with tiered pricing to reduce barriers to access. There are a few full and part-time staff growers, and a regular group of volunteers on Wednesdays. We are young and old, some of us at the beginning of our careers and some at the end. We are between projects, or uncertain about the future, or taking time out from work to do something meaningful. We are living on our own, or with flatmates, or with our partner and children, down the road from the farm or on the other side of London. There are always interesting conversations to be had and different points of view to be heard. I learn something new every week.
I am able to volunteer so regularly for a few reasons - as a freelancer, I have control over my schedule and can block out time to work on the farm. I’m young and fit and healthy, and I have no caring responsibilities. I come from a privileged background, and I have savings and the safety net of comfortably well-off parents who can help me out financially if and when I need it. I can afford, in so many ways and for so many reasons, to spend one day every week working without pay because I love to be on the farm. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been covering for some absences and working as a paid grower. My volunteering has made me into a skilled labourer, and given me the knowledge and experience to work alongside professional colleagues.
To be clear, I think volunteering is a wonderful thing. It provides people with connection, satisfaction in their work, new skills and interests, joy and solidarity with others. It allows people to gain experience in a wide range of environments, and also allows gardens to be more connected to their communities. However, amongst all the conversations in horticulture about environmental sustainability, there seems to be very little discussion of other forms of sustainability, particularly the sustainability of relying on unpaid labour, for both organisations and volunteers.
The principle of volunteering is that anyone can do it, and I do believe that a lot of these organisations mean that, and aim to provide a wide range of opportunities for people with different skills and physical abilities. However, the question of whether anyone can in fact volunteer is less to do with the offer from an organisation, and more to do with wider societal structure. Sure, anyone can volunteer, but who can take a full day off work to do so? Who can find the time to dedicate to their own leisure and self-development? Who can travel to gardens outside of cities and beyond public transport networks? Who is made to feel welcome in these spaces? Yes, volunteering is for everyone, but in horticulture ‘everyone’ ends up looking a lot like the preexisting workforce - white, able-bodied, and firmly middle class. If the majority of people who can access volunteering are the same kinds of people who already work in horticulture, the dynamics of the industry will never change.
Horticulture in the UK has a significant diversity problem. There are rich and dynamic growing traditions in so many cultures and communities in this country, and yet communities of colour are systematically locked out of land ownership and access. Most head gardeners in the UK are white cisgendered men, and the generation coming up after them isn’t much different. If volunteering is the entryway into growing, then the conditions of volunteering itself continue to actively exclude the kinds of people already missing from the industry - people of colour from working class communities.
The fact that horticulture is so reliant on volunteer labour is both a problem and an opportunity. If we think about the horticultural industry as a business (worth £28.2 billion a year according to the Horticultural Trades Association) then the fact that a significant amount of its workforce labour without pay is a systematic failing. It means that there is a gap between the amount of money the industry brings in, and the amount of work it takes to generate that income, and/or that the money is not equally or equitably distributed. The fact that volunteering is often framed as an opportunity for the volunteer rather than a convenience for the organisation also takes the burden of this unseen labour off of the industry and places it squarely on the individual.
However there is an opportunity here as well, for horticulture and agriculture to lead in creating a new political reality. It takes a village to make a garden, and to raise a child, and to build a community, and to make change. What would it look like if volunteering at your local farm or garden was something that truly everyone could do, and that everyone benefited from? If people were able to share in the things they grew, if care and responsibility were built into the system, if people could bring their children to play together during the work day? There is a possibility here for gardens to become centres of their communities, and spaces for the imagination and creation of a better political future beyond the cruelties and inequalities of neoliberal capitalism.
Horticultural organisations could begin by looking at the barriers to engagement and trying to remove some of them - offering support for parents and carers, giving volunteers something more concrete for their labour whether that’s food, some accredited training, or even access to the compost heap and materials to allow them to continue growing in their homes. There is a future where access to communal growing space is an integral part of a community, a return to the great British tradition of the commons; land for the common good and not for profit. There is a golden opportunity here, to start to model new ways of thinking about labour and community, new ways to support people and help them to grow.
In the last weeks of September, as the sunflowers on the farm were starting to go over and the encroaching autumn winds were toppling them, I would take a big bunch of windfalls home with me at the end of the day. Sometimes I’d have 30 blooms in my hand, big and unruly, from bright yellow to dark ochre, smaller lemony pale sunflowers and dusky pink ones. On the busy walk from the train station to my flat I’d find people looking at me, realising what I was carrying, and then breaking out into a smile. Again and again on the short walk, I’d get to see people’s faces crack open into joy at the sight of a big bunch of flowers on a noisy, chaotic street. One time a woman stopped to ask me about them, and I told her I worked on a farm and gave her a couple to take home. The satisfaction of that little walk, the sense of pride I felt in carrying those flowers and the feeling of joy in sharing them with strangers - there isn’t a monetary value that can be placed on that intangible glimpse of radiance. Another future is possible.
Joanna Pidcock is an Australian essayist, librettist and theatremaker based in North London, where she grows things on a balcony container garden. She is currently working on her first book, about colonialism, nature writing, and the idea of 'claiming' land. She was shortlisted for the 2021 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize. She can be found on Twitter here: @joannapid
Joanna is being paid for this article.
Photo credit: Joanna Pidcock
I feel this is a subject area that warrants further analysis and exploration. If anyone would like to write further on the subject of pay/free labour in horticulture, or has someone in mind who they think could contribute further, please get in touch and let me know. I should also take this opportunity to say that, any subject area that has previously been touched on here can always be covered again. It doesn’t make it “off-limits” and if you feel you have something to add, contribute to, or expand on a topic that’s been addressed here before, don’t hold back in approaching me with it.
This will be the last newsletter before Christmas. Radicle is taking a break until January. There’s a slim chance I may pop on in the interim with a newsletter for paid-subscribers, but free newsletters will not resume until mid-January. I was very much looking forward to attending this year’s ORFC in person in January, but that has now (understandably) been taken completely online. I will be taking part in one of the talks in the justice room co-programmed by Land in Our Names (LION) and Shared Assets, so maybe I will see some of you online there.
Wishing you all peace, many opportunities to rest and joy wherever you find it in this midwinter period. And happy winter solstice for next week too (I am hoping to celebrate Dong Zhi with my parents, assuming plans remain as they are. I’ve told my mum I’d like to make tang yuan. Would love to hear how you plan to mark solstice, if at all).