Homegrown Collective is a social business established in 2019, by a group of Liverpool women brewers and horticulturalists. They began by growing hops on community green spaces and in neighbours’ gardens and yards in North Liverpool, bringing people together to harvest and brew. Now they’re looking to develop a collective of community-owned training microbreweries in North Liverpool.
Homegrown Collective was launched with support from Power to Change and its Bright Ideas programme and is now part of the Power to Change-backed School for Social Entrepreneurs Scale-Up programme.
Homegrown Collective will launch its first community brewery – the Homegrown Regents Street Brewery – within Make’s North Dock building in October 2020. This ‘nano brewery’ will help it develop innovative models of localised manufacturing, creating a financially-viable business that sells beer locally, nationally and internationally – and will also pilot a sensory technology to measure its carbon impact. A second and larger-scale brewery will be launched at the end of 2021 in Anfield. This ‘Anfield’s Homegrown Brewery’ is part of the Homebaked Community Land Trust’s Oakfield Road development.
Homegrown Collective’s ‘beers with benefits’ programme helps support women in their neighbourhoods to become ‘brewsters’ (female brewers) by creating jobs in the male- dominated brewing industry. It supports them into the industry via training , mentoring and creating safe online social spaces for women to learn, share and experience beer. It trains local unemployed residents in horticulture and brewing to support them back to work and tackles endemic isolation within their communities, by running growers and brewers clubs to bring together horticulturalists and home brewers.
“Kindred has amazed me; when the chips were down they stepped up.” Says co-founder, Sam Jones. “We all have our pandemic stories, but my own is that when my father was seriously ill, Nic from Kindred worked with me late into many nights (and even over her weekend) to help me pull together a critical funding bid for the business.
“Kindred having our back spurred me and our local directors on. With a local connection via Kindred, we’re now supplying our first beer in Anfield and North Liverpool in partnership with Bernie Mays (Glebe Hotel) – and we’re about to launch our nano brewery, online shop and virtual learning programme.”