Cooking programs, for adults and for schools

An evening in our kitchen at Rozelle where locals cook around a hundred meals for neighbours who need them. You do not need to be able to cook. Somebody will show you.

In the school holidays and through the term, local school students come in and cook meals that go out to people in their own suburb. Most have never met anyone their food goes to, and that is usually the part that changes them.

We project manage the schools program using funding from Community and Family Support, the NSW Department of Communities and Justice program that brought together what used to be Targeted Earlier Intervention. Its Community Strengthening stream is for exactly this: local skills, local connection.

A practical skill, a shift alongside adults who are not their teachers or their parents, and evidence that something they made with their hands turned up at somebody else’s door. That is a difficult thing to teach in a classroom.