Our new programme, FoodWorks will bring people together to share and practice food skills enabling them to support and motivate each other to cook better for healthier lives.
“I’ve been given the ability to do more for myself and not rely on ready bought meals.”
We are best known for being the charity behind the award-winning Fifteen Cornwall Apprentice Programme and Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen Cornwall restaurant. We also work with schools across Cornwall helping teachers and students learn about growing and producing healthy, delicious, nutritious meals from scratch.
Fast food, bad food or no food: these are signs that something could be wrong in a life, a family or a community.
FoodWorks is a brand new, engaging, positive food-skills life-skills programme that gets chefs out of the kitchen and into communities to improve people’s health and wellbeing. If you’re living with diabetes, heart disease or mental illness, or if you’re feeling lonely, skint or hungry – joining FoodWorks can help you. It’s a short flexible food skills programme designed to help you flourish and open up new pathways for yourself.
Foodbanks, doctors, hospitals, counsellors, social services and charities have all identified a perfect storm of food-related poverty, health, community and social isolation problems in Cornwall. Cornwall has been identified by the government as one of the least developed areas in Europe, with one in three households struggling with food and a 300% increase in foodbank use in the last 18 months; food problems are certainly on the rise.
Food can bring health and wellbeing solutions too. We can use food and food skills to help people in really difficult situations live well and be healthy – give them confidence and skills to cook and eat better, and make thier money go further.
FoodWorks helps people tackle a variety of life problems which are holding them back by bringing them together to learn and practice food skills, explore better eating choices, share food and have some fun together. By teaching quick and easy, nutritious meals from scratch – that can be replicated at home and made on a budget – we are providing them with the tools to make lasting change in their own lives.
Here’s the outline of the FoodWorks programme:
Our ambition is to be able to deliver this programme not only for the next 12 months, but for the forseeable future. To be able to do this we need your help. With £40,000 we will:
By helping our project you are helping us to sustain our charity’s overall core objectives, which in turn benefits and changes the lives of the communities with whom we work in Cornwall.
Cooking with confidence, participants improve thier diet, health and sense of wellbeing. They gain new understanding of nutrition, learn how to balance thier meals and look after themselves better. Completing the course gives people increased motivation, self-esteem and the ability and aspiration to pass on thier new skills to other people, leading to improved relationships and better lives.
“The course has taught me that I can buy cheaper ingredients that may have less fats and sugars so I can make more homemade food.”
“I’ve enjoyed meeting new people and learning to cook properly on a budget and eat healthily.”
“It has made me feel more confident and more enthusiastic about cooking.”
“It has opened my eyes to homemade food, the nutritional values and being able to eat healthier.”
We need funding please to make FoodWorks available to as many people in need as possible where there is just no other funding. We’ve got a waiting list of community groups who want us to help them with FoodWorks but without funding we can’t deliver. Young single parents groups; pensioners groups; people recovering from addiction; schools and Foodbanks have all asked for community cooking courses – none have the resources to pay for them. We need your help please to make food work.
Thank you.
You may have noticed the catchy theme music in our main crowdfunder video – which was written by local Cornish band ‘The Claze’. Their lead singer and guitarist Gareth Dix was inspired by our programme and decided to write a song in support of the project. Check out the full music video, complete with lyrics, instruments and dancing leeks (yes dancing leeks) in the video below. Also see our rewards where you can get your hands on the song plus some limited edition merchandise!