The traditional model is simple: established organisations with track records get funding. They deliver services. Communities receive them.
Green Spring is testing something different.
The Infrastructure Problem
Brilliant community groups—the ones with deep local knowledge, trusted relationships, and genuine responsiveness—rarely have what funders require: £100k+ turnover, years of accounts, governance frameworks, corporate=level insurance policies.
Meanwhile, established organisations like Grow Outside have the infrastructure but not the hyper-local connections or capacity to work everywhere at once.
The question: what if infrastructure could serve rather than control?
Green Spring: from national pilot to a community-led network, testing flat governance.
In 2021, Green Spring emerged from a Treasury-funded National Green Social Prescribing pilot as one of seven test sites across England. Grow Outside was a partner from the start, working alongside NHS partners, local authorities, and nature-based providers to test how connecting people with nature could improve mental wellbeing.
As the pilot evolved, so did Green Spring—transforming from a time-limited project into an ongoing community-led network testing new governance models. More recently, Grow Outside has taken on the role of supportive container, providing established infrastructure and financial governance while Green Spring operates with autonomous, non-hierarchical decision-making.
This isn’t a subsidiary. It’s not a program. It’s a sister organisation testing whether community-led networks can thrive when given proper infrastructure support without surrendering decision-making power.
Grow Outside provides:
- FIinancial governance and contract management
- Access to funding streams requiring higher turnover
- Insurance, legal compliance, and administrative backbone
- Ten years of track record and credibility with funders
Green Spring maintains:
- Autonomous decision-making through flat, collaborative structures
- Community-led direction and priorities
- Direct relationships with grassroots providers and communities
- Responsive, non-hierarchical governance
This separation is intentional. Grow Outside acts as supportive infrastructure, not the central point. Power and decision-making flow through Green Spring’s network, not up to a parent organisation.
What Green Spring is testing
Provider collaboratives
Rather than nature-based organisations competing for scarce resources, Green Spring enables them to work together. Small providers share capacity, co-design services with communities, and access larger funding collectively while maintaining their independence.
Results so far: increased referrals, improved participant outcomes, new volunteer capacity, and additional secured funding—all achieved through collaboration rather than competition.
Community Asset Ownership
Supporting community groups to purchase and manage local assets—spaces, buildings, land—with ownership and control residing in the communities who use them.
Green Spring provides the established entity that can hold contracts and manage finances while communities develop their own governance capacity.
Decentralised Decision-Making
Testing governance structures that genuinely distribute power to the people closest to the issues:
- Rotating and adaptive leadership
- Shared decision-making among network members
- Community co-design from the ground up
- Non-competitive resource sharing
Sister Organisation Structures
Green Spring itself is a model being tested—can an autonomous organisation leverage an established CIC’s infrastructure without sacrificing community-led governance? Can we create genuinely flat structures while meeting funder requirements for accountability and track record?
Why This Matters
Communities working together for change. Community-driven enterprise and regeneration. These aren’t aspirations—they’re urgent necessities.
Current systems concentrate resources in established organisations while grassroots groups struggle. Short-term competitive funding creates scarcity thinking. Top-down delivery misses what communities actually need.
Green Spring is demonstrating that another way is possible. And proving it works.
The Work Continues
Green Spring’s ability to access larger funding streams depends on Grow Outside’s established track record and financial capacity. This infrastructure—the unglamorous backbone that enables community-led innovation—requires long-term investment to sustain and develop.
The ongoing work includes:
- Continuing to develop and test collaborative governance models
- Supporting community asset ownership and management transitions
- Building capacity in grassroots organisations to lead their own work
- Scaling what’s working while staying responsive to local needs
- Documenting and sharing learning so others can replicate these approaches
- Testing whether the sister organisation model can be sustained and replicated
What Success Looks Like
Not Grow Outside growing bigger. Not Green Spring becoming another hierarchy.
But communities growing stronger. More decisions made by the people affected by them. More resources reaching grassroots groups. More collaboration, less competition. More infrastructure that serves rather than controls.
We’re building scaffolding that communities can use—and eventually remove when they no longer need it.
Green Spring represents an attempt to reorganise power. To create infrastructure that enables rather than extracts. To prove that established organisations can support community-led work without controlling it.
That’s the experiment. That’s what requires support.
Learn more about Green Spring at greenspring.org.uk
