Plymouth school opens Japanese Garden
A Japanese garden has been unveiled at Salisbury Road Primary school, Plymouth thanks to Tesco.
Local MP, Luke Pollard, joined pupils, teachers and staff to officially open the gardens funded by a £10,000 grant won through the supermarket’s Bags of Help initiative.
“Every time you pay your five pence for a carrier bag in Tesco you are benefitting a local group. That means that 200,000 bags paid for this Japanese Garden!” said Mr Pollard.
“I had great pleasure in officially opening the gardens and would like to thank Tesco and all the Tesco customers who have made this possible through the Bags of Help scheme,” he added.
Class teacher Michelle Elshaw first heard about the Bags of Help scheme through a colleague and decided to apply.
She said: “The school is a beautiful Victorian building but is surrounded by a grey wall and we wanted to create an area that could be used as an outdoor classroom that parents could also use.
“Thanks to Groundworks and the Tesco Bags of Help funding we now have a Japanese inspired garden with an outdoor learning space and a seated area around a covered pond, with a bridge that will allow the children to safely walk over the pond and spot any frogs! There is even a dedicated space for the children to sit together for a story and a small garden surrounded by trees.”
She added: “We are a large primary school of nearly 600 children so as you can imagine this will have a huge impact on the children.”
Tesco’s Bags of Help project has already delivered £30 million of funding, helping more than 4,600 community projects up and down the UK.
Anne Stephen, Community Champion at Tesco Plymouth said: “It is wonderful to see this garden project come to fruition, showing first-hand how a Bags of Help grant can help transform local projects.”
Bags of Help provides thousands of projects with vital funding every year.
Tesco teamed up with Groundwork to launch the monthly roll-out of its funding scheme, which sees grants of up to £4,000 being awarded to fund local community projects – all raised from the 5p bag levy.
Three community projects in each local area will be voted on by Tesco customers every time they shop, using a blue token given to them at the checkout – the projects being voted on change every other month.
Community groups and charities can apply for funding and Tesco customers and colleagues can nominate projects that they’d like to see receive some cash. Just ask in store for more information of visit the Bags of Help website, www.tesco.com/bagsofhelp
