Our Founder and CEO Pam Greenhill was a teen mum at 17 with no prospects and no particular marketable skills. Born in Australia, she grew up in a tiny village in Wales where her mother's family resided and now found herself back in Australia with a new baby on the better side of a very volatile and abusive relationship and no clue what she was doing.
She loved to read but what she read were how to books and she would practice what she read. She had a love of archaeology and history and dearly loved to play around learning the skills that others learnt and how they would create what they needed in their lives from scratch.
Meanwhile she had become an apprentice chef as her dad had said "people are always going to need to eat".
When her second son arrived 5 years later and she still found herself alone and with little spare funds she moved with her boys to a rural town in Australia where she put her book learning into action.
She taught herself how to garden to grow food, raised all kinds of birds for eggs, meat and feathers and bought 2 piglets, 2 lambs and a steer calf every year to raise and end up on the table each year.
From there she learned to preserve the food she grew and raised and how to create cloth from plants and the sheep. Everything she did she did by hand and she even went so far as to gain her butchers and abattoir licenses so she could make sure that her animals were treated the best from their first day with her until their last.
By the time the year 2000 rolled around she was a qualified chef, butcher, dietitian and nutritionist with several fingers in pies and was in NZ doing a job swap when she was called to come home as her father was gravely ill. She was home in 2 days and he passed 24 hours later. They had given up their home in rural Australia so she could go overseas to work and when her mother threw her and the boys out the day after her fathers funeral Pam yet again found herself and the boys homeless and in a strange town in a women's refuge.
They settled into the new town the local Family Support Centre staff approached her and asked her to teach a 16 year old teen mum to cook as she was feeding her baby pureed Big Macs and living on 2 minute noodles and Vegemite toast. She agreed immediately and that's what she did. It also started a 20 year project that she wrote and we use today to teach self reliance and self sufficiency on what she calls a "Rain Water Budget".
In 2009 she found herself back in the UK after much travelling and working everywhere and has been here pretty much ever since.
Now residing in York with her partner she felt if she was ever going to make her project a legacy there was no better time than now.
She is still learning and continues to gain qualifications wherever she can to help herself and others. These days she has added herbalist and naturopath to her ever growing list.
Her one rule is "If I can help just one person I will keep going"
