News

Our garden based project, SIG Penrose Roots observed Mental Health awareness Week with the a unique intuitive. Their “lettucebekind” campaign involved leaving lettuces with messages of support around Luton for people to pick up.

The ‘Lettucebekind’ initiative grew out of the need to observe Mental Health Awareness Week in a different way that would take into account the social distancing rules. In previous years the team had hosted ‘Walk and Talk’ (and cycling) but that would not be possible this year.

The initiative began with the team of staff and volunteers planting and nurturing 50 lettuce seeds to give out to the community. By May 18th, the team harvested the lettuces, made care labels and were ready to start. They randomly placed lettuce plants across Luton; at bus stops, parks and green spaces, doorsteps and in various residential streets. All carried the message – #lettucebekind – perhaps the Roots to kindness can start with yourself, be kind to this lettuce and it will repay your kindness.

For Samantha Smith, Roots project coordinator, LettuceBeKind was the perfect way to illustrate the Mental Health Awareness day theme of kindness. She said, “This was a huge effort by the whole team and helped to get the message of kindness out there as a gentle reminder that in these days of supposed disconnection we have never been more connected.”

The campaign was a huge success and had many tweets and messages from excited community members who had found one of the lettuces and uploaded a photo to their social media accounts. The campaign also got mentioned on the BBC East twitter live update and the team were invited to talk about the campaign on BBC 3 counties radio.