The Vine Centre Community Cupboard
What was your project and why did you apply for funding?
Our project is to reduce food waste from our Community Cupboard and through cookery sessions to teach our beneficiaries how to make the most of their food, money saving tips and recipes from ingredients that they may not have previously known how to use.
We applied for funding because we found that there were many items in our Community Cupboard that were not being taken and wanted to show our beneficiaries that there were ways to use these ingredients to make cheap and healthy meals - and to stop them going to waste. We also wanted the learning to continue further and decided to create a book to showcase the recipes made (and more!) and no waste tips
Please briefly describe how you set up the project
We were lucky in that we were almost ready to go as soon as we received the funding as we were using mostly food from our Community Cupboard and had someone to help with the cooking. We just had to advertise to our beneficiaries and get people to sign up.
What have been your successes?
We are finding that people want to do more cooking so have been able to put on extra sessions, which allows our beneficiaries to attend more than one and gives more people the chance to come along. The continuity of having it more regularly helps with sign ups and retention.
Some of the people attending do not have access to hot meals at home, so are very grateful for the cooking facilities. Some have been unable to cook for themselves for some time.
What lessons have you learnt which might be useful to other groups/organisations?
We are learning that our book is taking more time and input than we originally thought it would! And that the recipes we use do not need to be over complicated - we can make something very tasty with a simple recipe.
To fully plan a project and accept help and input from others.