Community Fridge to Community Cooking (360G-SCVO-a0g3z00000HpNieAAF)

We plan to develop our successful Community Fridge which runs from Eyemouth Community Centre, to run cooking courses for the local users of the fridge & residents of the Community. We will work with the abundant supply of donated vegetables and other ingredients to run classes to demonstrate how to use these foods to cook and enjoy nutritious meals. We plan to run a weekly 3 hour morning session to prepare and cook a meal in the Community Centre kitchen area. This will then be eaten together with the participants (if they wish) or taken away to enjoy at home with other family members. There will also be a supply of the ingredients and a recipe provided to allow them to replicate this at home. Surplus portions will go into the Fridge for everyone to benefit from. Every 4th week (when the kitchen is unavailable) we will invite along guests representing other groups and agencies who can assist with any issue that the attendees have or to encourage them to join other classes etc – example guests would be Healthy Living Network, Abundant Borders, Citizens Advice, Eyemouth Foodbank, local Chefs etc. We will also use the funding to upskill our volunteers in REHIS Food Hygiene and Welfare Reform Training available through CA so that are able to assist the attendees. Over the 9 months we will run 4 Programmes of 8 weeks duration however participants will be able to continue to attend the new Sessions if they wish to. Our Community Fridge has been running now for 12 months and it is very well used by a cross section of the Community – there are some users who are regularly there every morning and this has allowed us to engage with them – this in turn has led to us referring to our local Food Bank for some of them – The Community Fridge is the main source of referrals for the Food Bank as a result of this. We have spoken to many users and they have all said that this is something they would really benefit from as they are struggling to budget effectively and say that the Fridge is a necessity for them however they don't always make best use of some of the produce as its not 'ready made' Also now that the fridge has been running for a year we know we need to develop this to encourage more people to use it and for it to be a source of more nutritional value to more people and make more use of the vegetables from the supermarket and from donations from Abundant Borders. The Fridge is situated next to the Kitchen in the Community Centre and is in a communal area and we have been offered use of this to help develop the idea We are very fortunate to have an active group of volunteers who run the Fridge – this involves food pick up and delivery and stocking and maintenance of the Fridge – this works very well on a rota system however many of the Volunteers have said they would like to now do more to develop this – 5 of the volunteers have already passed REHIS Food Hygiene Cert as part of this development which we used previous funding for and they now want to be part of a cooking group so that food can be made and put back into the fridge. Some of the regular users who are waiting in the morning are also starting to engage with helping out with stocking and we are keen to recruit more of them to help in the future (one previous user is already a regular volunteer) Our volunteers are keen to learn new skills in cooking too. Although our aim is to help the users of the Fridge who are struggling as a result of welfare reform and who we will target specifically in the beginning we want to create a programme that is open to all and seen as an opportunity for people to learn 'cooking from scratch using what's in the fridge'. We will particularly encourage young and not so young to learn together. This will also assist to reduce isolation as we notice that a large proportion of users are older gentlemen who live alone and we want to encourage the 'eat together' idea where what is cooked that day is eaten together. This Project will be based in Eyemouth Community Centre and will be available to all residents in the locality.