Who are we?
Dartmoor Community Kitchen Hub is a social enterprise that provides the older population of Greater Dartmoor with affordable, nutritious meals. We have a warm space commuity hub and cafe where we run activites and can offer subsidised meals to the over 60s.
A large part of our work centers around educational research, with Exeter and Plymouth Universities, to discover the optimal nutritional standard for the elderly. Through this research, we have provided meals on wheels to many members of our community, but we often find these people tend to be malnurished and socially isolated due to ill health, fraility or disability. More recently, we are working on developing products that help increase the standard of nutrition in care homes also.
There is no national nutritional standard for the elderly and this needs to change.
The Project
There is a huge need to tackle both malnutrition and social isolation in the older populations and our new project aims to do just that. We will provide a nutritionally balanced hot lunch delivery service, complete with a dessert and an additional cold supper meal to eat later in the day. These meals will be delivered by fully trained volunteers, who will stay with the person, conduct a wellbeing check with them and spend some time connecting with that person. For some, this will be the only contact they have with anyone all week.
The Advantages
Our previous research has shown that better nutrition, particularly increased protein, improves physical health with less fraility and reduced sarcopenia (muscle declinecaused by aging). We also found that participants reported improvements in their mental health and mood. These improvements reduce the burden on the NHS and the wider economy.
Our project will improve the nutritional standard of those more vulnurable community members.
The Cost
Each meal delivery and wellbeing check will cost us £23, so we are looking for people to support us with all or part of the cost of a meal and wellbeing check. Of course, we aren't going to stop you from sponsoring more than one meal!