[Jo] It's all about food, glorious food! I'm gonna introduce Dave and Gemma from Cracking Good Food to talk about some work they've been doing in Adswood and Bridgehall over the summer. It's called Veg Up. And that was with families. So I won't steal your thunder. I'll let you talk all about Cracking Good Food and stuff that you've been doing to support our communities. Thank you. [Gemma] Thank you for having us both. My name's Gemma and I'm the co-director of Cracking Good Food. And you'll have to excuse me, I'm struggling with my voice a little bit today. So Cracking Good Food, we are a not-for-profit social enterprise and we're fighting for sustainable food security for all people across Greater Manchester and beyond. So our traded income, health... [audio cuts out] ...school classes, urban foraging expeditions, team building parties and low carbon catering. And all of this helps to support our community outreach work that involves a range of projects to support people, to eat well and to access good ingredients and to know how to cook with them. Throughout our work, we've we sort of identified a lot of barriers to good food. Obviously , this all does tie in with climate, and we were actually set up 10 years ago with very green ideals. Being kind to the environment and sustainability of the food industry are very core to how we operate and are our key values. So the barriers that we've we've encountered to people eating well and accessing good food include affordability, access to food and ingredients... [audio cuts out] ...David will tell you a little more about this shortly. Disability, lacking in skills or knowledge around food, particularly as it was taken off the curriculum at school, a lack of connection to how food is grown and how it's produced. Often people have the idea that eating healthily or eating well has to be boring or expensive, or you need expensive equipment and such. And many other barriers. So throughout all of our work, we're trying to break down these barriers and help people access good food. So if I could have the next slide, please? So throughout all of our work... [audio cuts out] [audio cuts out] We have developed links to food manufacturers to ensure that their surplus goes to good use either by us or by our network of surplus food providers and users. We encourage and support people to connect with growing food. We have a community allotment plot in Withington. We share [audio cuts out] We encourage the strengthening of local economies by shopping local, which is something that we also do as well as supporting other people to do. And we include all the people that we come into contact with. We include them in conversations about food and sustainability, as well as supporting other green initiatives such as Chorlton Bike Delivery. We're trying to look at ways of doing things to maximise [audio cuts out] It's green and environmentally friendly as possible. There's a short list here of our work in Stockport what we've been doing. One of which projects was Veg Up, which was run in July and August, and my colleague Dave is going to tell you a bit more about that now. [Dave] Great. Thank you. My name is Dave Hanlon and I'm a project manager with Cracking Good Food. I was going to talk about Veg Up Stockport. This was a pilot project that we ran over this summer in Adswood and Bridgehall, funded by the Stockport Food Fund, which was in turn funded by Stockport County and also by Sector 3. We also received funding from The Charity Service. So we received funding in that way. We ran the project in Adswood and Bridgehall, areas which, as Gemma touched on before, we would classify as a having examples of bigger food deserts. So there's a lack of availability, of particularly fresh produce and fresh fruit and veg, and in those particular neighbourhoods there are effectively three local stores, convenience stores. There's no major supermarket, even though that there is on the external outskirts of those areas. And so the project effectively was to deliver what we call the veg bag, which was 3 to 4 kg of fresh fruit and veg every week. We recruited 50 participant families, and you can see on the right hand side the poster that we used to recruit our participants. We then delivered, each week for six weeks, this mixture of usually 7 to 8 varieties of fruit and veg. We gave everyone a spice kit at the beginning just to get them going. And we then during the project as well, we were able to give everyone a fresh herb plant. We back this up with recipes and we did two workshops and we set out to do some online. I guess which didn't really work, but that was quite interesting as a learning for us. So the aims of the project were to improve health and nutrition of participants, to educate through vegetarian recipes, which was really exclusively what used in in this project. As I said, the online support which didn't quite work as we intended, and two workshops and we ran two burrito making workshops. One in the Adswood Youth Centre and one at Bridgehall Community Centre, which, because we were in the main August holiday, were quite good fun. Particularly at Adswood so that was good. And another aim of the project was to increase awareness and uptake of Healthy Start vouchers, which nationally and in Stockport have a take up of around 50 to 55% of those those eligible. It varies sometimes week to week, month to month. But we were just interested to try and raise perhaps the profile of these to the participants, as it would then provide some ongoing resource for them to access fresh fruit and veg and obviously, to redistribute perfectly good good food destined for waste. The food, as we mentioned earlier, is sourced from FairShare and because we had 50 families and we were doing 3 to 4 kg, so each week we were picking up 200 to 225 kg of food from from FairShare, which is Manchester's main number one food redistribution charity based in the wholesale market in Openshaw. FairShare, I think it's quite important to stress, they operate within what's called the food use hierarchy so businesses are legally obliged to start by reducing food waste to then feed people in need, to then feed livestock, then compost before the final element is disposal. So there's quite a chain there, and obviously FairShare are quite involved in the first two elements of that. Another interesting thing that we found this year was just the insecurity even for groups like ourselves using FairShare. So, as you have seen, if you can't get tomatoes in the supermarket, you also can't get it from fair share as well. And we found over the course of this year difficult to access, sometimes the food that we needed for our projects. Obviously, today we're talking about environmental impact. So in terms of Veg Up as project, I think the main impact that we could make was just a positive use of the redistributing surplus food, helping to reduce food waste, preventing it going to waste, obviously provision of ingredients and also education through the recipes that we provided each week to help people to transition to a more plant-based diet. I think in terms of learning, this was quite an important element for the group that were involved - it was a different retail model. So it's an area with less success. [Jo] Sorry, Dave. I'm just going to give you a heads up. It's just that we've just got a set time for everybody, you're slightly running over, which is really disappointing because you've got a lot on there that we really want to hear about. What I think we'll do is share the slides afterwards, if that's okay. [Dave] Yeah, the last two things are just the main thing. So that's fine Jo. You go ahead. [Jo] Wonderful. Thank you. And Gemma I hope your voice gets better soon and wonderful work. And we were delighted to support you for the pilot project. And we hope that it's something that sustains beyond the pilot and something that we can, like you say you've learned from it and we can improve on for the future. So thank you. And thanks for all your hard work.