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CFHS Blog

Guest Blog: Cash First approaches to addressing food insecurity: What is the role of health visitors, midwives and family nurses?

In this guest post, Dr Flora Douglas (Reader in Nursing at Robert Gordon University) discusses her recent research: In late 2019 I was commissioned to undertake a short, focused piece of work to develop a better understanding of lived experiences of parenting on a low income in Aberdeen City, by NHS Grampian’s Child Health Commissioner. …

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How have Healthy Valleys created a sense of community during online cooking courses?

Simone Janse van Rensburg tells us what she has learned from delivering their first few online courses – for parents with young children and two different weight management groups. About the courses Simone and her colleague, a cook tutor too, created some home-made videos of recipes they knew people enjoyed at face-to-face sessions and found …

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CFHS blog – online cooking skills courses: tips and ideas from REHIS

Since March last year, The Royal Environmental Health Institute of Scotland (REHIS) has allowed REHIS course presenters to deliver the REHIS Elementary Cooking Skills course virtually, using platforms such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom. Adapting training to a virtual platform is not without its challenges, so REHIS recently developed some additional guidance for its course …

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On-line cooking sessions -Tips and ideas from Edinburgh Community Food and Greener Kirkcaldy

Edinburgh Community Food (ECF) and Greener Kirkcaldy, both usually run regular face-to-face cooking courses. They now deliver these online and gave us some tips and ideas based on what they have learnt. What approaches are they taking? Greener Kirkcaldy’s initial focus last year was to provide easy-to-follow recipes by providing cooking demos on their YouTube …

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What’s in a name? – Redistributing surplus food via Food hubs, food banks, social supermarkets, larders, community fridges and pantries….. Does the label matter?

In this blog post, our colleague Jacqui McDowell gives her views about the variety of community food provision models using surplus food: Surplus food, emergency food aid and the pandemic  Putting to one side any debate and discussion on surplus food (such as definitions or sustainability), redirecting surplus food to emergency food aid has been …

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Guest Blog: Cooking skills online – learning from Feeding Fifers

Lyndsay Clark from the Feeding Fifers team tell us what they have learnt from putting cooking skills work online: Feeding Fifers now has their very own Face Book page! The Facebook page went live on the 25th November 2020 and now has nearly 300 followers. It has been a steep learning curve for two of …

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Voluntary Health Scotland survey on vaccine hesitancy

VHS is carrying out important research across the third sector to help ensure that the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine doesn’t widen the health inequalities gap by missing vulnerable groups. VHS are keen to ensure that the opportunity to get vaccinated is made as easy as possible for everyone in Scotland, including those who are …

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The Community and Third Sector Recovery Fund is still open

The Community and Third Sector Recovery Fund is continuing to provide grants, including to organisations providing support with food. For more information and to apply visit: https://scvo.scot/support/coronavirus/funding/scottish-government

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#CommunityFoodNearMe: reflections on community food work in my area

#CommunityFoodNearMe is our social media campaign to recognise local community food activity, which we launched in September 2020. It came from a conversation with colleague, Jacqui. We were having a phone walking meeting, discussing our social media presence. We started to chat about the importance of community support around food during lockdown, and as I stopped at …

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CFHS blog: Food insecurity research conference – learning from across the globe

We recently attended the second ENUF (Evidence and Network on UK Household Food Insecurity) UK conference on research, food and poverty. Around 200 people attended this virtual conference, including a good mix of people from academia, public health and community food projects. This two day conference covered many topics. In this blog we provide a …

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