Case Study | How our support has helped Steph and her children
Our Cooking at Home and Lunch Crowd projects support families eligible for Free School Meals or who are at risk of food poverty, during the school holidays. When term ends, many families find themselves with additional pressures impacting their ability to provide adequate nutritional food for their families.
Lunch Crowd involves opening up our school kitchens in the school holidays and serving School Food Plan and Food for Life compliant hot meals to families attending a partner-led club.
Cooking at Home involves providing a recipe-led grocery parcel that empowers families to cook low-cost healthy family meals. This is offered in conjunction with online how-to videos, and peer-to-peer support.
Steph and her three children, aged 9, 11 and 12, attend one of our Lunch Crowd clubs in Swaythling, Southampton. One of her children has ADHD, and another as autism. They all receive Free School Meals during term time, and Steph is also supported by a carers allowance and income support, and is currently applying for term time jobs. Steph older daughter, and her newborn grand-daughter, also live with them.
Steph and her children were signposted to the Lunch Crowd club, which launched in October 2019, by her school. The club is run by a collective of volunteers linked to Swaythling Parish, and two local schools work together to support their most at need families during the school holidays. City Catering, as their term time school meals providers, gladly support the club – providing hot meals to families, for free.
In response to Covid-19 however, the club was not able to run as planned during the April, May and Summer school holidays. Despite this, its organisers and volunteers still set out to support families – knowing that the need was only going to increase. They arranged collection or delivery of activity packs and food to support their growing list of families. As part of this, City Catering donated a weekly grocery box for each family containing enough ingredients to cook two healthy meals, with the recipes included.
“ The grocery boxes helped massively, and made sure everyone in the house had a healthy meal and when mum isn’t stressed, the children are also less anxious.”
To extend the support to families during the pandemic, City Catering also provided online cook-along videos, recipes and guidance, and a dedicated Facebook group to access the resources through.
Steph loved the recipe cards, and made all of the meals. Steph commented that they “provided a different way of doing things, and a chance to speak to others too who had made the recipe each week and watched the videos” - she especially loved the Lentil Bolognese! Steph has also been growing a lot of vegetables in her garden this year!
Steph commented that in her experience, healthy good is more expensive, and without support, money would have been a real challenge during lockdown with the children at home.
We are really grateful for Steph spending the time to talk to us, and letting us know the difference it has made. If anyone who benefits from the work that our teams do would like to share their experiences, please do get in touch. It really helps others to know that they are not alone. Thank you!