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Recruiting and working with vulnerable groups

Beyond food banks

The Scottish Government recently published Cash First: Towards Ending the Need for Food Banks in Scotland. In this blog post, we highlight a few examples of what community food initiatives are already doing to contribute to the actions in this Plan. Larger organisations such as Community Food Initiatives North East (CFINE) and Lanarkshire Community Food and …

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Guest blog: Sue O’Neill-Berest from Cyrenians on food insecurity, cooking and using CFHS development funding to run sessions for young mums

Something to eat, someone to eat with The Food and Agricultural organisation of the United Nations has suggested that 8.4 million live in food insecure households in the UK. (Taylor, 2016) Some research conducted predominantly out with the UK found no significant positive link between the ability to cook and food security, whilst other studies …

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CFHS blog – How can you support people with learning disabilities to eat better?

Finding good resources suitable to help people with learning disabilities to eat well can be a real challenge. The healthy eating, healthy living training pack is a unique tried-and-tested resource that provides thorough information on how to promote healthy eating messages in an interactive, simple and fun way for people with a range of learning …

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Cooking skills blog 33: Working with vulnerable groups: Supporting people affected by food insecurity: ideas from practitioners

Last year, Katy Gordon, a PhD student took part in an internship within CFHS. Katy ran an online survey and interviewed practitioners to find out how they supported people experiencing food insecurity on their cooking skills courses. Her full report ‘Just getting on with it’ is now available.  Meanwhile here are few examples of activities they …

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Cooking skills blog 28: How do cooking course practitioners support people experiencing food insecurity?

Katy Gordon, a PhD student took part in an internship within the CFHS programme late last year. She focused on a project on food insecurity and cooking courses and carried out an online survey and interviewed practitioners from six organisations. Here are the main findings from a report (which will be available in May). Six …

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Cooking skills blog 20: Are cooking skills courses any use to people experiencing food poverty?

Many practitioners running cooking courses across Scotland try to ensure these focus on preparing tasty, affordable healthy meals, using ingredients that can be bought in the shops that course participants already use. However, what do you do if you become aware that someone on your course might not be able to afford these budget recipes, …

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Cooking skills blog 11. Recruiting and retaining ‘vulnerable’ course participants

Our guest blog writer this week is CFHS cooking skills study group member Gail Hutchison. Gail (ANutr) has been running community cooking skills courses for Edinburgh Community Food since 2013 and has recently begun to run these for  NHS Forth Valley’s Nutrition and Dietetic Health Improvement Team on a part-time basis. In both areas, Gail …

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Blog 6 – What does it mean to support ‘vulnerable’ people on your cooking skills course?

Our cooking skills study group are running their cooking skills courses for ‘vulnerable people’ and/or ‘parents (or carers)’ living on a ‘low-income’. As we’ll be gathering collective evaluation information, we had to agree on how we define these categories. Defining ‘vulnerable’ wasn’t easy. It can include many people, from a recently widowed older man to …

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