Cracking Good Food

Cracking Good Food has had a Cracking Good Start to 2012, and we hope you have too.

All our cooking sessions in January and February sold out quickly and we have already sold out on a few coming up in March and even in May, but we are trying our best to keep up with demand by adding new ones – so keep checking the website to find regular updates and information, and of course to book the cooking sessions.  We have also extended the length of some Saturday sessions due to public requests… so watch this space!

As most of you will know, we have been core funded by the Local Food Fund for 2 years. That 2 years has now ended. At the beginning, everyone, including the LFF, thought we were being a little over-ambitious. Here’s what we have achieved since our launch event at the Big Green Festival in March 2010 –

We said that we would aim to deliver 91 cooking sessions and 20 HOPs, reaching 1910 participants altogether. In fact we have delivered 116 cooking sessions and 31 HOPs, reaching a total of 2782 people. We said we would work with 5 local food growers and providers; we’ve worked with 12. We said that we would work with 30 different community groups and organisations; we’ve worked with 40.

A huge thank you to everyone who has contributed to this success!

But what now? We’re not about to see all this hard work come to nothing…..

Times are very tough on the funding front, for everyone. There’s more competition than ever before, as so many organisations and public bodies have seen their own funding cut and they need to find ways to plug the gaps. We’re now also up against local councils on many of these applications, and the available pots of cash are shrinking across the board. It’s been frustrating to spend huge amounts of time planning a project and writing the funding bid, and then to come away empty handed.

Our long term plan is to work with the NHS/public health directorate in delivering healthy eating cookery programmes to patients referred by their GPs, but the system for this is in a state of change until April 2013.

However, we have succeeded in getting funding from the Home Office, to work alongside the Probation Service on a 12 month project, which has been great news.

As a successful project which has reached and surpassed its outcomes, we have recently been invited by the LFF to apply for Supporting Change and Impact funding. This would enable us to spend time on evaluation and further forward planning / doing preparatory work in relation to public health contracts which will enable us to be fully sustainable and not reliant on funding.

We also attracted funding from Manchester City Council to run two 5 week programmes with residents of Nell Lane Estate, starting next month.

We have also been asked to run 4 sessions at Barlow Hall Community Centre, two with a youth group and two with an over 50s group.

We won the U Decide competition to pay for us to be at the Big Green Festival again this year, this time cooking up pizzas with Rob, in conjunction with the guys from  Stretford Clay Pizza Ovens. Please book your place here and thanks to this funding we can offer half of the places FREE for people currently unemployed / students in full time education or over 65 years of age.

Kim is continuing with the 6 week programmes at the Angel Centre in Salford  and is about to start the third programme.
Unfortunately there’s no more funding for further programmes after the 4th and final one in a few months’ time. The feedback has been very positive.

We will be continuing to work with Chorlton Good Neighbours, a community group for people of retirement age.

Finally, we want to continue our work with NACRO, a charity working with the homeless, people with substance abuse issues and ex-offenders and we will be jointly writing an Awards 4 All (lottery) funding bid for this.  We want to keep our promise to work with residents of Old Moat and the Pankhurst Centre, but this will also be dependent on funding.

We’re continuing to partner up with Manchester Museum on allotment cooking and foraging sessions.

We’ll be looking into ways of generating a Cracking Good Friends donation scheme in order to keep the community cooking alive.  More details soon.

Not forgetting now our regular and very popular programme for the public…
…and if you don’t know which one to go for, our vouchers have become even easier to buy, as they are also now on the website and are just a click away.

We look forward to cooking good food from scratch with you!