FED is a community kitchen run by a group of secondary school students. We make ready meals using fresh ingredients that have come from independent businesses in our town. The meals are distributed to local families who are in need a extra help and care at the moment. For some our extra meal offers a bit of help when finances are really stretched. For others, struggling with health problems, not having to cook a meal one evening can give them a welcome break.
Each meal is a community effort. Most of our key ingredients come from Buy-It-Forward schemes in our local greengrocers and pur zero-waste shop. Customers add a little extra to their bill which we then exchange for ingredients from that shop when its time for us to cook. This means the small businesses benefit too.
We hope to encourage local food producers to get on board as time goes on.
The students are volunteering their time to run FED themselves. They have all taken on roles from publicity, design, book keeping, recipe development and project management - hopefully all useful stuff later in life.
In return, the students are being mentored in cooking skills which they then use to cook a different meal for their community each month. They have all taken and passed their Food Hygiene and Safety Certificates and have registered FED as a food business with their local council - so are all legit in terms of being a food business.
We need additional funding to help with all the behind the scenes bits involved in running a scheme like this. We need to pay for printing, labels and packaging. One of our students is a coding geek who is designing a website to raise our profile for more support - but we need money to pay for the website hosting.
To start with we are cooking 100 servings/ 25 meals once a month, but would like to be able to cook more. To do that we want to get more volunteer students but need to pay for their food safety and hygiene courses. We've been gifted a professional kitchen once a month, but to cook more we need to hire a local hall for additional days.
If we get this right, FED can become a huge asset to our community.
*It will teach teenagers cooking skills using good fresh, ingredients.
*They will have professional kitchen experience and food health and hygiene qualifications to help them into local pub and cafe weekend jobs.
*It supports independent local food businesses and producers and raises their profile through our publicity
*It gives an edible community-hug-in-a-bag to the people that could most do with it.
