The Eastbourne project giving people the life skills they need to beat back food poverty

An Eastbourne project is equipping people with the skills they need to conquer food poverty.

The project, dubbed Let’s Get Cooking by organiser Community Stuff, consists of an eight week training course, to be delivered to communities in need throughout Eastbourne and beyond.

The course, which will cover everything from basic cookery skills to budgeting, will be taught to budding volunteers from across the community. From there, they will be able to spread the Community Stuff message to church halls and community centres across the country.

Part of what makes the Let’s Get Cooking project unique will be its ability to provide extended support to the communities which need it. Trainers will be on hand to provide regular guidance over a three year period, making sure people on the course make the most of the skills they have been taught.

Mentors could be anyone, from people who have battled food poverty themselves, to those still struggling, to others who are simply looking to help.

According to Clare Hackney-Ring, one of the directors of Community Stuff, what is most important is a desire to contribute to the community.

She said, “Really, when it comes down to it, mentors need to be people that enjoy helping other people and they need to be people who enjoy cookery.”

This is not the only thing Community Stuff has done to fight food poverty. Last year a book was published called Beyond The Foodbank, which provides recipes, meal plans and budgeting advice to help people reliant on foodbanks make the most of their weekly food boxes.

The new project has been years in the making: for people like Codirector Sue Morris, it is the result of careers spent working in the community.

She said, “We started Community Stuff, applied for funding, and started running plays in the park for children, that sort of thing. It was a long summer holiday and there wasn’t a lot to do. We started talking to the parents and lots of them just could not cook at all. So it went from there.”

That grassroots approach has served Community Stuff well in the past, leaving it uniquely positioned to evaluate the problems the people in the community face.

Clare said, “People have always been very honest with us about their problems. They might pretend to other organisations that everything is fine and they know what they’re doing, but, for us, they’ll be truthful.

“The people who use Eastbourne foodbank currently are not always people on benefits. They are people who are doing one or two jobs to pay their bills and still can’t afford food. That’s the reality of life in Eastbourne. And it’s the same for lots of people around the country.”

Her comments are echoed by last year’s foodbank statistics, which show that a record 1.6 million food parcels were given out to people up and down the country.

Eastbourne is not the beginning and end of Sue and Clare’s ambition however. Community Stuff hopes to roll its plans out quite a bit further, using contacts with national and community groups like Big Local, to reach up to 150 deprived areas.

Despite their ambitious scope, neither Clare nor Sue see Let’s Get Cooking as a means of ending the food poverty crisis.

To them, it is not about solving the problem: it is about empowering people to make the most of their often negative circumstances.

Clare said, “We don’t have a magic wand. We can only empower people with the tools and the enthusiasm to have a go at being a bit better organised and eating better and using fresh ingredients.”

To find out more about Community Stuff and to volunteer for the Let’s Get Cooking programme, which is due to roll out later this year, contact [email protected]