A national network of healthy cooking clubs for children, their families and communities, backed by a £20 million grant from the Big Lottery Fund's Well-Being programme.
Led by the School Food Trust, Let’s Get Cooking is using the Lottery funding to set up an initial network of 5,000 out-of-school cookery clubs by 2012, which will enable over one million children and family members to learn new cooking skills.
As well as giving children and adults the skills and confidence to cook nutritious and tasty meals from scratch, Let’s Get Cooking is also about having fun. Clubs, which are mainly run by volunteers, receive funding for cooking equipment and running costs as well as a variety of resources. Schools that already have a cooking club can apply to become associate members at any time, whilst full club places (for new cooking clubs) are by invitation and are proving immensely popular, with places snapped up as soon as recruitment opens in each area.
Since its launch in September 2007, Let’s Get Cooking has signed up more than 3,600 schools, trained more than 2,800 people in food safety and cookery demonstrating, and run Start-Up events for more than 6,000 children and adults.
Let’s Get Cooking’s exciting range of resources for clubs are jam-packed with healthy recipes, ideas for community cooking events, news and information. Examples include; a specially designed recipe linking to Jamie Oliver’s Pass it On campaign, a range of recipes from the characters of Disney’s High School Musical 3, recipes and advice for growing and cooking with herbs and the Let’s Get Cooking annual reports.
At a recent Let’s Get Cooking Start Up day in Luton, which participants unanimously rated as ‘excellent’, England Chair of the Big Lottery Fund Sanjay Dighe praised the programme. He said: “It was a real pleasure to see so many children carrying out various cookery tasks with such great assurance…Our investment in the School Food Trust is one of our most important decisions, with the potential to improve lives for many years to come. I am proud of our support for them.”
Let’s Get Cooking’s two-day Demonstrator Training course has recently received accreditation from the Royal Society of Public Health.
