The VC Gallery gets cooking

Aim

Helping people to learn skills, budget and create amazing meals together for all to enjoy every week.

Our amazing team of volunteers many of them Armed Forces Veterans, currently cook a tasty, healthy two course meal for the less well off members of our local community. Ex - forces volunteers bring people into the lunch club, socialise with them and take them home. They are often able to take a small portion home for the following day too.

Our 'pay what you can afford' weekly lunches are extremely popular and see us feeding 60 people at one sitting!. 

We want to use the money to buy more food to prepare shared meals on a weekly basis for 60 of our most vulnerable local residents. Many of them live alone and  don’t have a home cooked meal only managing to heat up ready meals and grab snacks. The cost of living is affecting many in our community, who we already support through a mixed timetable of activities. Our experienced staff help with welfare issues, benefits and signposting to food banks and other opportunities within the locality. 

This initiative wants to go further, with participants the day before lunch, prepping the meal, learning new skills, budgeting, shopping for ingredients, batch cooking and ultimately serving the food the following day.

This project successfully funded on 27th January 2025