Training parents to cook in their communities

One of our core projects involves training parents to become food ambassadors–enabling them to run healthy cooking sessions for families in their community. Our training courses take place over about 5 weeks and are led by our experienced community food workers. The course involves participants gaining their food hygiene certificates and practical cookery sessions, including a fun ‘ready steady cook’ challenge finale. Our vision of the project is to build a self-sustaining, strong and healthy community, with a focus on eating lots of fruit and veg and reducing food waste.

One of the great things about the project is bringing people together to build and develop meaningful connections – to build a strong community who can promote healthy eating to other families. Our parents are from all over the globe, including Bangladesh, Somalia, England, Pakistan, Jamaica, Iraq and Tanzania and they share and teach one another about their recipes; it is a really special way of celebrating the cultural diversity in Lambeth.

Here are a couple of quotes from some of our parents on our programme:

‘It’s been really cool. I thought it would be really stressful but it’s really relaxing and at the end you're feeding a part of your community which is wonderful’.

‘So far it’s been amazing being part of helping to make different cultural dishes. It’s a great feeling to give back and support the community’.

On 16th August and 20th August our food ambassadors took over the Platform café opposite Loughborough farm, where they provided a delicious healthy affordable lunch. Read more about that below.

All our meals are vegetarian with a focus on seasonal, local veg.