Food for Thought

The Food for Thought Project is a three year funded project through The Robertson Trust, CORRA Foundation and Awards for All. Our aim is to increase community cohesion and peoples’ life chances, enabling them to develop essential skills for lifelong learning resulting in an enhanced connectivity across the community. Free access to new opportunities and activities identified by the parents/ advisory group will reduce social isolation and loneliness and increase opportunities for people to make new friends and have fun. Additionally, people will be inspired to build stronger family relationships.

The Food for Thought project has provided families living in the Larkfield community the opportunity to come together and contribute to the projects outcomes. 

We underestimated the amount of people who needed the support of the project and although covid restrictions and high sickness levels of staff the project has continued to meet outcomes however our timeline of delivery has been affected.

The Community Cooking sessions in Youth Connections, Larkfield was a support programme for parents to learn how to cook together with a healthy eating community cook leading the delivery. The project provided a relaxed environment for parents to try cooking healthy recipes. It actively promoted healthy food choices for families. The idea for the project came from discussions with local parents. Through ongoing consultation, a group of young mums identified lockdown obesity as being an overwhelming challenge to their overall mental health and wellbeing. 

The project has provided 10 weeks of health eating sessions. Our first 4 sessions were delivered on a Saturday to a group of young mums.

The participants discussed the savings they made by cooking their own Indian style sauce compared to ordering takeaway. Some people had paid as much as £32 on Indian take away and were delighted they could now make their own takeaway.

The cooking sessions have provided participants with new skills and confidence to experiment with food. They were provided with copies of recipes which they can make at home and many of them shared their experiences on FB.

Participants also took the food they had cooked home providing families with access to free food without stigma to some experiencing real food poverty.

Healthy Eating sessions delivered by Viv our Community Cook