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What 1% means to St Werburghs City Farm
July 20, 2026
A vital green lifeline, stretched to its limit
Just 1.5 miles from Bristol city centre, St Werburghs City Farm has spent decades turning 18 acres of green space into something the city can’t do without. Between its working farm, community garden and Boiling Wells conservation area, the Farm gives around 50,000 visitors a year and 3,500 regular beneficiaries, a place to learn, grow and belong.
Its team works with some of Bristol’s most under-served residents: adults living with mental health struggles, children and young people facing deprivation or finding school hard going, adults with learning disabilities, and communities who too often face barriers to green space and the environmental sector altogether. Through farming, gardening, animal care, cooking and land-based training, the Farm builds skills, confidence and connection – while also sharing knowledge across the city to strengthen Bristol’s wider green and community networks.Despite the vibrancy, learning and connection growing in every corner, the Farm, like so many charities right now, is under real financial strain. Without places like The Farm, Bristol wouldn’t be, well Bristol. It is for this reason why We Back Bristol has emerged – so that socially minded businesses can give back.
The challenge: doing more, with less
Like so much of Bristol’s charity sector, St Werburghs City Farm is caught in a painful squeeze. Staffing, rent, resources and energy costs are all rising faster than the Farm’s income can keep pace with. The past year alone has brought redundancies – a direct hit to a small, dedicated team already stretched thin.
The Farm has worked hard to close the gap wherever it can: growing earned income through space hire, weddings and events, and finding efficiencies across every part of its operation. But it has now reached the point where it can no longer safely dip into its reserves. Years of drawing down unrestricted funds to cover core costs mean those reserves must now be protected, not spent – or the organisation risks insolvency.
Trust and foundation funding, meanwhile, offers little relief. As the Farm describes it, the sector is “very challenging and oversubscribed,” with organisations pouring hours into applications only to learn that hundreds of other charities applied for a handful of available grants. It’s a familiar, exhausting story across Bristol’s charity sector – more competition for a shrinking pool of money, and less time left to actually deliver the work.
The toll isn’t only financial. The Farm is candid that the strain has affected its people directly: the stress of last year’s financial pressures is something staff are still recovering from.
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Why local business backing matters
For St Werburghs City Farm, the answer isn’t just more funding applications – it’s a fundamentally different kind of support. As the Farm puts it, local solutions and local support “make a massive difference.” Local businesses understand their communities. They can build real relationships with local charities, staying responsive to the needs of beneficiaries in a way that distant, oversubscribed grant pots simply can’t.
This is precisely the gap We Back Bristol exists to fill: coordinating that local business support so it becomes sustained and strategic, rather than one-off and unpredictable. In the Farm’s own words, having central coordination through We Back Bristol “is just such a good idea.”
The bigger picture
St Werburghs City Farm is not a struggling outlier – it is a thriving, high-impact organisation, reaching thousands of people a year, that is nonetheless being pushed toward the financial edge by rising costs and a fundraising landscape that can’t keep up with demand. If an organisation of this scale and impact is having to ration its reserves and absorb redundancies, it is a clear signal of how much pressure is sitting across Bristol’s wider charity sector.
This is exactly why We Back Bristol is asking the city’s independent businesses to give 1% of revenue back into their communities. Reliable, local, long-term business backing could be the difference between a charity like St Werburghs City Farm having to shrink its services – and being able to create a future where communities thrive, green spaces flourish, and together we grow.
Imagine if every business gave 1%.
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