Our pilot Nourish programme is in its final few days with our 4 trainees graduating from the training portion of Nourish tomorrow. This programme has been underpinned by a monumental community effort.
We wanted to highlight a few areas which especially illustrate that, without which, Nourish would have been very difficult to deliver. Hopefully in so doing, you will get a little flavour of what our trainees and our team have experienced and achieved together!
- Our strengths based, trauma-informed work & life skills sessions have taken place in the (very cool) board room at co-working hub; ArcSpace, behind the peaceful babbling Wandle river. ArcSpace have given us this boardroom free of charge, and we are incredible grateful for their generosity. We couldn’t have imagined a better place to deliver these sessions which have covered challenging topics from growth mindset & goal setting to managing conflict, healthy relational boundaries, physical, emotional, spiritual and mental health and a whole heap of more specific work skills sessions. Suffice it to say, it isn’t only our trainees that have been learning, and there are some very special trainers- named below- who have given their time to us who have made this possible- not least Mari Day who has carried a major part of the training delivery.
- One of the aims of Nourish is to connect our trainees in with sustainable food systems as part of the larger re-connecting work we hope that Nourish will enable for our trainees. We try to do as much of this ‘on site’ as possible which has looked like planting out hundreds of garlic cloves in symmetrical lines into the soft earth of regenerative growers Sutton Community Farm. We have had the privilege of learning about the process of smoking sustainably caught fish on a trip to Wimbledon Smoke House, owned by Moxons, purveyors of some of the finest fish in London. We have encouraged a nature connection and deepened an understanding of seasonality, through our time spent harvesting produce at Paradise Cooperative, cooking over fire and creating hedgerow cordials.
- A thread that has run consistently throughout the programme has been the training of kitchen and food skills, delivered primarily by Laurence Callaghan in partnership with Well Kneaded Ltd. We started by establishing strong foundations in compliant health and hygiene practice within a food context and have progressed through knife skills, food preparation methods including dough handling, shaping and pizza making, & in the last week or so, the dots are being joined on the sustainable food side as trainees started delving into the world of food preservation and fermented food flavours, each began the process of creating their own hot sauce.
- Punctuating these sessions and trips which have run Wednesday-Friday each week have been a few other special strands which are of note. Our two community lunches, run by the trainees, onboarding of our first cohort of mentors who will be connected with our trainees imminently, a whole host of shadow shifts which has seen our trainees shadowing Well Kneaded team members on the floor and in the kitchen, and a work experience week hosted at various London locations (Kerb- Seven Dials Market, Home Community Café, Sutton Community Farm and Wk Events- huge thank you to you all). These amazing organisations have all taken our trainees under their wing to give them the opportunity to gain valuable experience that will support their journey into employment which is at the heart of what Nourish is all about.
The only thing left to say is thank you. Thank you to funders, to supporters, to our team, to family & friends, to those supporting us by eating at the pizzeria or booking us for events…the list is long and that isn’t lost on us. We know we wouldn’t be able to do what we are doing alone. THANK YOU!
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