How Leeds community network is delivering moments of joy while feeding families

Based in Harehills, it is one of around 40 trusted grassroots organisations supporting the aims of Leeds Community Foundation's Healthy Holidays Fund.

This Easter, as in other holidays before, they had planned to run activities with children whose families might be struggling without schools meals.

Instead, they found themselves at the heart of city-wide efforts to ensure the most vulnerable were fed and able to access other support service.

Like so many of its initiatives, the centre's recipe cards came in direct response to listening to the challenges families talked about as its staff and volunteers dropped off food parcels.

Its chief executive, Nahid Rasool, said: “We realised that a lot of the time, people don’t even know what to cook with those ingredients. We said we’re going to give ingredients and how to cook it. The food we’re delivering is to cook with the whole family.”

On the lighter side of things, it has inspired cooking competitions for children and the Cooking with Zaynah series of YouTube videos.

But as with all the activities offered through the Healthy Holidays programme, it is also about engaging with families who might be in need of other kinds of support.

Nahid said: “We designed activities because we know a lot of the women and girls are going to be stuck at home with violent partners and children are at risk.

“This has been such a difficult time for our service users and our staff. We didn’t leave them on their own though. The programme is one way of engaging with our community who are really struggling.”

On the other side of Leeds, New Wortley Community Centre is usually home to everything from parenting classes and youth clubs to lunches for the elderly.

Rebecca Houlding, who manages the centre’s Building Blocks health project, said previous work with Armley Hub and local primary schools meant the centre was ideally placed to help out with the delivery of food parcels and activity packs during lockdown.

“It’s a really important project for our areas because of the number of families that are struggling,” she said.

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Its community-led approach of catering for all ages also inspired one of the activities being delivered to dozens of children.

The letter writing kit in one of the packs has not only helped to keep primary school children engaged but it has also reduced the social isolation that elderly residents may have been experiencing.

Letters about life in lockdown written by pupils who normally attend three local schools were delivered into care homes, with residents now writing back to them.

“At first it was holiday hunger and it was making sure the kids got fed, but it’s that engagement and interaction,” Rebecca said. “Some children don’t get that in their home. It’s been really, really good in that way.”

The community foundation has recently been awarded £450,000 as part of a £9m Government programme to ensure around 50,000 disadvantaged children across the country can be provided with meals and activities during the summer holidays.

Four organisations – LS14 Trust, Fall Into Place, Playful Anywhere and Seagulls Paint – have been working together since lockdown began to provide activity packs along with the food parcels delivered in east Leeds.

They hope to secure of a share of this summer’s funding for the Mini Playbox project, which will provide play boxes for families in a group of streets to use for socially-distanced activities.

Fall Into Place co-director Naomi Roxby Wardle said: “It’s really important to make sure we can get food and medicine and all the essentials to the families, but it’s also really important they can still get the joys in life. They’re the things that can be really missed.

"It’s about remembering the whole person, not just the immediate needs.”

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