Rosie Danford-Phillips
Rosie Danford-Phillips once showcased her fashion designs at Paris Fashion Week. Today, she’s the driving force behind the communications and community engagement at Roots and Shoots, a UNESCO award-winning South London charity providing vocational training and green space access for young people with special educational needs. In this conversation, Rosie shares her journey from fashion to purpose-led work, the transformation sparked by a new website created in collaboration with Hotfoot, and why investing in good storytelling can be a game-changer for charities.
Please can you start by introducing yourself and telling us a bit about what you do?
Hello! My name is Rosie. I work at Roots and Shoots, which is an educational and environmental charity based in South London. We primarily work with young people with special educational needs, providing vocational training in gardening, floristry, customer service and hospitality – helping them with their next steps into employment.
We also run forest school and food growing sessions that engage young people and primary schools with nature, a horticultural therapy programme for refugees, and sustainable venue hire services for green organisations and charities. Because we’re a charity, we have to be dynamic to thrive and survive – we do lots of different things, which makes it hard to pin us down!
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
I wanted to be a fashion designer – and I was, for a while! I used to channel my love of art and nature into wild prints, textiles and clothes, but after COVID hit, I realised I loved nature more and needed to do something that felt purposeful. I’m very lucky to have been able to make that shift.
Tell us more about your journey from fashion to Roots and Shoots.
I studied fashion, had my own brand, and even showed at London Fashion Week. My last exhibition was at Paris Fashion Week in February 2020 – just before everything collapsed. Personally, it was a bit of a relief. I’d started to realise it wasn’t the right path. Fashion felt unsustainable, unethical, and exhausting.
My mum, Linda (Phillips MBE AoH, Director), founded Roots and Shoots in the 1980s, and as a child I went to the local school, so I spent a lot of time there. As a teenager, I completely lost interest in it – since my parents worked on it I thought it was very uncool, and as being there was my normal as a child, I didn’t realise how special a place it is. During the pandemic, I recommended a friend to work there and he started telling me how brilliant it was, and it made me take another look.
After closing my brand and searching for fashion jobs which all seemed unappealing, I started volunteering. I organised our first community event post-COVID, which reignited old childhood memories of climbing trees and poking frogs with friends in the gardens. That event made it clear we needed a proper website – no one could find us! Luckily, from my experience in the fashion industry I’m a great visual and written communicator, so I was asked to take it on.
What do you do on a day to day basis at Roots and Shoots?
I’m not on the main programme education side, but I support all the other strands – community engagement, special projects, and collaborations, we did one with Butterfly Conservation last year. We have a horticultural therapy programme on site called The Grounding Project, it’s a South London and Maudsley NHS programme for refugees and asylum seekers who’ve experienced trauma. With Butterfly Conservation, I organised a series of workshops inspired by the natural migration of butterflies, which culminated in a large butterfly sculpture in our gardens and a World Refugee Day celebration.
I also organise community events, corporate volunteering, and now regular volunteers as well. Our students study horticulture, but that’s just one part of their programme, and our site needs a lot of work to keep up our high standards. We have groups of up to 20 corporate volunteers coming weekly to support the site and local gardening volunteers who generously share their time and knowledge.
I originally joined to help create the new website in collaboration with Hotfoot – writing, sourcing imagery, and figuring out how to communicate everything we do to the many different people who need to interact with us. Once the website was live, my role shifted to handling all the leads it generated, and fundraising to expand and improve facilities on our site to support new interests. For example volunteering used to be quite informal, but demand surged, so I built an entirely new system to manage it – and then learnt to run the days themselves as well.
I’m also really passionate about connecting children with nature – especially in our local area of Lambeth, which has limited access to enriched green space. I set up a pilot programme free nature sessions for local schools, funded mostly through donations that came in via our website, which we’re planning to expand in the coming years.
So yes, my role is hard to define – but it’s all about responding to the opportunities we’ve been lucky to receive and building programmes that serve our community.
What is it about Roots and Shoots that feels so special?
It’s an incredible place, a sanctuary for people and nature to thrive together – a rare place where everything and everyone is treated with respect, care and nurturing. Underpinning it all is the gardens – it really is true that plants make us happier, and a creative spirit which runs throughout.
What’s most impressive to me about Roots and Shoots is that in the 1980s when Linda first started the project (it was originally planned as a 3 year project set up by the Lady Margaret Hall Settlement charity, Linda was hired as their first manager), it began in a derelict brownfield site polluted with industrial waste, with only a single bush on site. All of our mature trees, hedges, every plant has been grown and nurtured by staff, students and local volunteers with very little funding. Good will has gone a very long way and you can feel it emanating the second you walk through the gates.
As a child, I thought places like this were normal – but they’re not. They’re really rare and precious. Doing the website gave me the chance to learn what Roots has evolved into over the past 20 years since I romped around as a kid. It’s grown so much – we had around 10 staff when I was young; now it’s closer to 50; with hundreds more people being supported every day – students, school pupils, venue hire guests, volunteers, refugees, touring visitors, community groups and more. We really make use of this precious place!
You serve a lot of different audiences. How do you approach that?
People don’t fully understand Roots and Shoots until they visit. That’s the challenge – how do you get the feeling of a place across online? Great photography helped, and we invested in at least one shoot each year across the seasons. Then it was about mapping everything out and simplifying it. Our main programme is vocational training, but most students don’t come through the website – they come via schools or local authorities, and the website is just supporting. The site is more of a tool for our social enterprises: venue hire, events, and volunteering.
Somehow, the website has just worked. Our SEO is amazing! We have attracted so many organisations and individuals who really align with our mission since launching the site.
Has the new website helped create new partnerships?
Absolutely. It’s made a huge difference.
A big part of how we fund our site maintenance is via our venue hire social enterprise, where we rent out rooms in our sustainably-run buildings to other charities and green organisations doing incredible work. We have a professional kitchen to feed venue guests, where chefs work with our students to train them in catering, and use vegetables and herbs grown in the gardens as ingredients. We used to run the service only on word of mouth, and so the website has been a big help to streamline booking a room, and of course increased our bookings so that we now have a full time member of staff running the venue.
We now get around 300 corporate volunteering enquiries a year – but only have space for 30, so I had to build an entire infrastructure to handle that. Two years on, the volunteers have made a huge difference – the site looks amazing. It used to be just a few volunteer groups a year; now it’s 30, and they get so much done. The corporate volunteers also bring in income for our environmental projects like nature sessions for local schools and a new gravel garden.
Local volunteers have also increased, as have community event attendees. It’s all been really positive.
We’re constantly contacted with all sorts of amazing opportunities and donations that I don’t think we would have had before the website. It’s fabulous. So we’re big fans of Hotfoot!
That’s great to hear! How do you measure impact?
Probably not as technically as we could! But we look at how busy we are, how many new staff we’ve needed, and the increase in student numbers-we’re up to 50 now. Venue hire is up, volunteer demand is up, and we’re having to build new spaces just to keep up.
It feels like we’re thriving.
What’s next for Roots and Shoots? Any plans to expand?
That would be the dream. But it’s tough – what underpins our work is the fact we have 1.5 acres of land in central South London. When Roots started in 1982, the land wasn’t seen as desirable, so it was affordable. That’s not the case now. Still, maybe someday we’ll be able to expand, who knows what the future holds?
Roots and Shoots in the early 1980s
Do you do any projects off-site?
Our horticulture students do gardening all over the local community, but generally at Roots we’re all about the site itself. That’s our USP. We’ve been invited to speak at various events, but most of us prefer to stay put and invite people here instead! It really feels like a sanctuary, and it would be amazing to recreate that elsewhere.
Has the new website helped with fundraising?
Definitely. When people can see what we’re doing, and how we’re doing it, they trust that their money is going to the right place. Because we’re now well established, our core costs are covered – so fundraising really does go to the “good stuff” like nature sessions for kids. It’s all very tangible.
Since the launch of the website, fundraising has been so much smoother. People can see the impact clearly. It’s helped us attract not only donations, but brilliant new staff who arrive already understanding what we do-because they’ve read the site. That clarity and professionalism is thanks in large part to the work we did with Hotfoot.
What advice would you give to other charities about fundraising and communication?
Invest in good photography and keep your messaging clear and concise. People doing good aren’t always the best at explaining it and sharing the message. A great copywriter or storyteller can help enormously. Every charity has a compelling story – you just need to make people care.
Any challenges you’re facing given the economic climate?
There are always challenges. Roots wasn’t always this stable – it nearly closed in 1994 and was saved by community support. Things got more stable after the 2014 EHCP (SEN funding) changes. Linda (Phillips MBE AoH), our Director who’s been here since the beginning, kept it going these past 42 years through sheer determination. If you can hang on and be creative when it’s challenging, something amazing can come out the other side.
What advice would you give to young people entering the workforce today-especially those interested in working for a charity?
Working in a charity is ideological. You won’t make the most money, but you’ll sleep well at night. There’s so much joy in what we do – like when a child (or a corporate volunteer – adults deserve environmental education too!) sees a frog for the first time and they just light up.
Charities need all kinds of skills. I came from fashion and business and had all sorts of abilities no one else had at our charity, and it’s been so beneficial to use those skills in a new context. Most people who work at Roots and Shoots had a previous career and decided to make a change. We all bring something special, which is what makes charities such vibrant communities. I’ve found my creative skills especially valuable – you can make a big difference just by creating a great poster for an event, or by editing a fundraising application.
Volunteering is a great way in – you learn how things work from the inside, and people see what you can bring. Charities always need help with something and often aren’t funded to do everything they want and need to, so search around for a few that align with what you’re passionate about, get in touch and see if you can support them. So yes – volunteer, show your skills, and you might just find your place.
Anything else you’d like to add?
I’d like to thank Hotfoot – creating the new website together was a great project and it was so enjoyable to collaborate with such lovely, creative and technically skilled people. Our collaboration with Hotfoot genuinely transformed how we’re seen and how we operate. It’s helped us reach new people, hire better, and communicate what we do far more effectively. A good website puts a charity in another league – it’s invaluable.
Discover more about the work we did with Roots and Shoots here or visit the Roots and Shoots website.
Also check out our recent interviews with Jeanna Vella, Director of Marketing at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, and with Jessica Smith, Director of Communications at St John International.
