Kinship Carers Cooking Club

Aim

KCCC provides ingredients and guided cooking sessions of healthy foods to kinship carers who access peer support and combat social isolation

Where did the idea for our social Enterprise come from?

I am a qualified social worker with fifteen years experience of front-line social work. So far, in my career I have worked with a wide variety of service users, from children and families subject to child protection plans, to children in the care of the local authority, foster carers, adopters, adopted children and kinship carers. I have extensive experience of safeguarding, court work, care planning and completing direct work to bring about positive change with children and families. 

Over the course of my career, I have increasingly come into contact with kinship families- not surprising, seeing that the number of Special Guardianship Orders has risen by 193% since 2010. I started noticing that in my work with them, time and again, the same issues kept coming up: kinship carers felt unsupported, even abandoned, by statutory services. Many of them were angry, and most of the kinship carers I came into contact with were completely despairing and feeling either that they were failing the children in their care, or that they had been tricked into stepping up to care for these children without having been given the adequate information or support. Family after family reported the same issues: poverty, difficulties with managing contact, unmet emotional needs of the children in their care deriving from trauma, and housing issues. At the same time, I was also able to witness the dedication and the stability that kinship carers were able to offer to these very vulnerable children in the face of adversity, often at great personal cost. Many kinship carers put the children in their care before their relationships, their careers and sometimes even their own children. I felt frustrated and outraged that more wasn’t being done to support kinship carers, and constrained in my ability to help within my statutory local authority role. They weren’t receiving the type of tailored, informed and compassionate support that they desperately needed. I decided that I wanted to set up a project to better support kinship carers in my local area, and that in order to do this effectively, I would need to step outside of my statutory role and think more “outside of the box”. 

Sadly, it is still the case that many statutory services lack the specialist understanding needed to work with this particular group of carers and children. Although there are areas of crossover with fostering and adoption social work (we are talking, after all, of the same children), kinship care also presents with unique challenges, as well as strengths. Support services tend to focus on the quality of parenting the children are receiving, and rightly so; however often this happens at the cost of ignoring a stark fact, which is that vast numbers of kinship carers have to cope with often limited financial resources, especially when children arrive unexpectedly, and have the added stressors of dealing with fuel, food and housing poverty whilst caring for traumatized children. The widespread poverty among the kinship carers population is an inconvenient truth that is usually talked about, when it is mentioned at all, solely in terms of individual cases. This distracts from what is a systemic issue related to the political choices made around public funding over the last decade and a half.

So I decided to take a new approach to kinship care support by starting Kinship Carers Hub. With Kinship Carers Hub, my main objective is to provide a very practical form of support to kinship families in need. Aside from social work, my other great passion is cooking and healthy eating. I have been organizing dinners and food related social events for friends and family for many years. Even in my role as a statutory social worker, I often use cooking activities with the children and carers I work with as a method of engaging and communicating with my service users, always receiving very positive feedback. In 2015, I had a brief career break from social work due to personal reasons, and during this four-month period I worked as a cook for an after-school club, cooking for up to thirty-five children, five days a week. This was my first inkling that perhaps I could turn my passion into a job; however it was not until five years later, in January 2020, that circumstances aligned so that I could start Kinship Carers Hub.

The origins of Kinship Carers Cooking Club

The Kinship Carers Cooking Club launched in January 2020, as a small South-east London community group. The idea was simple: meet once a week with kinship carers and their children, cook and eat a meal all together. The aim was to give the children an opportunity to meet other children being raised by connected people; the carers to access peer support; everyone to learn some healthy, budget-friendly recipes, and everyone to walk away with a full belly and some food for the week. Our initial group was an immediate hit with local kinship families, and we had fifteen people walk through the door on our first meeting!

The cooking club is an opportunity not only for children and carers to do a bonding activity together, but also for kinship families to receive groceries on a weekly basis without having to attend a food bank or approach children’s services for support, with no judgment and no questions asked. Moreover, our cooking club enables kinship families to learn to cook healthy food on a small budget, making them less reliant on future food donations and improving the whole family’s overall wellbeing. But it’s not just about the food- it’s making connection with each other while sitting together to share a meal; nurturing each other; an opportunity for cultural sharing and validation. Carers are not seen as passive subjects of a service that is being “done to” them; they are an active and integral part of the service as they contribute recipes, traditions, stories and their own cooking skills to the experience. The children who attend the club get to see other children who are not growing up with their parents and feel less alone and more “normal”. Their self-esteem increases as they learn new skills and can proudly show their accomplishments for everyone to enjoy. 

We ran the group initially for nine weeks, until mid-March 2020, when the first lockdown was announced. Like many other organizations, we had to think fast about how to continue to support kinship families in this rapidly changing scenario. We partnered up with another local community organization and started delivering cooked food to approximately fifty local kinship families in our immediate local area once a week; we did this for ten weeks at the height of the first lockdown, after which time our families signalled that, with the easing of restrictions, many of them were able to return to work and visit shops again, so no longer needed a meal delivery service. Our families however indicated that they were desperate for positive activities to entertain their children, as schools continued to be closed and creative activities were thin on the ground; also money continued to be tight and many kinship families were still struggling with food poverty. 

In January 2021, we were back in lockdown, so we decided to re-launch our cooking club in a different format- we would deliver fresh ingredients to our families, and run the cooking sessions on Zoom. In other words, if the families could not come to cooking club then we would take the cooking club to them. We were helped in this endeavour by volunteers to help us deliver the ingredients and recipes to our families every week. 

Kinship Carers Cooking Club- present and future

With Covid restrictions fully lifted, since January 2022 we have started offering regular in-person sessions again; however, we have kept the online sessions too, as they have enabled us to reach a wider number of kinship carers, including some out of London who simply buy the ingredients in advance and join the online sessions on the day. 

With the increase in cost of living, the household budgets getting tighter and public sector funding becoming less and less, in the last year, both Kinship Carers Cooking Club and Kinship Hub have grown to meet the needs of more kinship households. In February 2022, we launched our employability program through our trading arm- Kinship Kitchen catering. We're able to offer our kinship carer members training, mentorship and ultimately flexible paid work opportunities. All profits from the catering arm of the company go towards funding the rest of our Kinship Hub projects.

To help meet the needs of the growing Kinship Hub and Kinship Carers Cooking Club membership as well as Kinship Kitchen catering services, we have grown our workforce to a total of 9 people that are offered paid work opportunities. We're currently setting up a pilot Kinship Carers Cooking Club in the Enfield area of North London so that we may serve the kinship families in that region starting from January 2023.

How will Aviva Community Funds help Kinship Carers Cooking Club?

The funds earned through Aviva Community Fund will go towards operating costs for our weekly Kinship Carers Cooking Club to cover groceries, delivery drivers and enable us to increase the advertisement of the group to the larger community.

This project successfully funded on 31st December 2022