“If you want to go fast,
go alone.
If you want to go far,
go together”
Kindroots Collective
We Are More Than just an online shop
We are an ethos combined with a vision - a small organisation with big dreams!
Kay and I met on a project in Scotland, both having spent years travelling and living the workaway lifestyle. Surprisingly, ‘workaway’ is still pretty unheard of, but it’s sort of like having a temporary job with on-site accommodation and instead of getting paid, you just get to live with no bills, usually in interesting places with interesting people, and normally learning new skills along the way. It’s actually a great way to take your first step out of the work/grind culture . We fully recommend checking it out if you’re looking for a way to experience alternative living and meet new people.
Anyways, very quickly we realised we were meant for each other, when you know, you know, right? And that led to us discussing life goals and such like and pretty quickly, we both realised we were looking to make a difference in this world, and with so many overlapping interests, one thing led to another and before we knew it we had a plan!
Thus, KindRoots was born, and we are now turning something we love doing (foraging!), into an income stream to make our vision a reality, whilst also promoting the ethos we ascribe to. And The Collective has been growing ever since, we’ve developed a network of supporters, and everyone has been helping out where they can. It’s been amazing to have so many people get behind our vision, as well as some incredible feedback from our customers, so we can’t help but feel we must be on the right path!
So what exactly is our ethos?
Fundamentally, our ethos is a response to the overwhelming amount of greed and selfishness in modern society. While also recognising it’s being driven by a manufactured and unnecessary competition for basic resources, causing many to suffer so a few can prosper. We believe there’s a more compassionate, more balanced and more sustainable way to live. And to be honest, it’s unfair to say “we believe” - we know it's true because we live it!
We can produce more than enough for ourselves, and plenty more to provide for our local community and even wider. We understand why some people might want to hoard their wealth in today’s society, but it just doesn’t have to be like that.
If you didn’t have to pay for your food, you didn’t have to pay for energy, and you didn’t have to worry about being taken care of when you’re older, because you have a community that provides you with those things so that you can provide your skills and time in return, would you still want to keep all your wealth and resources for yourself? Or would you be more willing to share them?
We’re willing to bet that most of you would choose to help your local community, if you didn’t have all the stress, pressure and competitiveness that comes with today’s society. As individuals, humans are capable of incredible things, and if we weren’t made to feel as though we had to monetise them in order to survive, just imagine what a whole community could achieve.
Like many streams make a lake full of life, so too can our resources; and that’s our ethos!
‘How do we think our way through the messes we’re in,
when the way we think is part of the mess’
-Nora Bateson
Our Vision
If you’re still reading at this point, I’d guess you’re either completely on board with what we’re saying, or you think we’re pure lunatics! But either way, you must be intrigued by how we plan to pull it off, and we want to be completely transparent about our plans and goals...
So first off is generating an income so we can develop the project.
Currently, KindRoots is a ‘for profit’ business, with profits from the sale of our products supporting our low-cost, low-impact lifestyle, whilst working towards acquiring land we can use to help others. Neither of us come from money, and we’re both doing this off our own backs with the little savings we have, along with our combined knowledge of ‘the system’ and the natural world. We don’t want to ask for donations, we would rather offer products and services to our supporters. So, (shameless plug alert!) if you want to support us, just buy some of our stuff, even if it’s just to gift it to someone else!
The next step is to actually acquire land. We currently live in our campervan on the retired farm of a good friend and supporter (who we met through a workaway opportunity, funnily enough), with use of their home and land to live and work on, which has been instrumental to us reaching this point. But our aim is to buy land of our own in the near future.
Once we have this, we’ll develop a market garden which enables us to offer organic veg boxes locally, as well as providing ingredients for the KindRoots products range and the KindRoots Kitchen. We’ll also share the space with others who want to connect with nature; by hosting travellers, workaways and other community groups.
The stage we are at now, is integrating into the local community, developing the products and sales, and exploring other avenues of income; such as hosting markets and our own pop-up café ‘KindRoots Kitchen’. We also plan to offer an odd jobs service locally (paid at living minimum wage, until theres a possibility of offering this by donation) under the KindRoots banner as another way to bring in a little revenue while helping our community. So, it’s set to be an action packed year for us!
And in case that isn’t enough to fill our plates with… we’ll be applying to make KindRoots a CIC (Community Interest Company), meaning we can apply for funding, we can pay ourselves a fair wage, and most importantly, the profits generated go back into the CIC to help us do more good things.
The end goal is for the business side of things to generate enough income for the CIC to acquire land and develop it into a place that will give something back to the people, create a self-sustaining community; and a blueprint, resources, and knowledge for anyone else wanting to do the same.
All you need to do is choose a different path, try something new…
Meet the team
Contact us
Interested in working together? Fill out some info and we will be in touch shortly. We can’t wait to hear from you!