How to Help
The Story
In January 2020 we took on a large a scruffy old mechanics unit in Tongwynlais just North of Cardiff and began to transform it. This was a couple of months before the Ist lockdown. As Covid Rules began to relax the large workshop became an great safe place for several young people to learn creative construction skills and see their work included in a commission for a contemporary street installation in Cardiff City Centre and contribute to making the first extraordinary micro-house.
We need to transform how we live and work on this wonderful, finite planet. So many of our social systems are stretched and dysfunctional. We want to make a real difference so that we co-creates ways of living for the wellbeing of our communities and our environment. We aim to make a number of collborative interventions, some radical, some just common sense, to enable people to build and enjoy the fruits of a community where there are connected spaces for growing food, cooking, working, meeting and sharing, upcycling creating, caring for each other and our environment. There is a self supporting social enterprise business with employee ownership that will be making individual and handcrafted furniture along with building imaginative and cost effective small scale living units. The Bottega project plans to take advantage of the newest developments in technology and software to take examples of succesful social and digital models from around the world. There is a 3 year plan to develop a genuine school for change, where all are students and which empowers its students citizens to work within communities to identify and seed and nurture the changes which they can see are necessary and acheievable without waiting around for someone else to do it.
The story started over 5 years ago as the realisation of a long term dream of John Whitehead, inventive sculptor, engineer and social innovator. In the years after conceiving, and building the hugely sucessful Talgarth Mill Project in 2010 with an award winning lottery bid and hour long BBC TV program.
The Bottega now has a core group of members many inspiring supporters and strong links with other groups within Cardiff and South Wales....