This year at A National Voice’s Amplify event we recognised some of the excellent work being done by children in care councils and care leaver forums in England.
Our Campaign Award is for groups that have been involved in a meaningful campaign in their area. This year’s winners were Sunderland Change Council, a group that empowers cared for and care experienced children and young people to voice their opinions, run meetings, create actions, and influence services in Sunderland.
They created and promoted a cookbook to help young people who are moving into independent living. Here they share why and how they developed their project.
We understood how difficult it can be to move into your own home and feel like you are lacking in cooking skills.
So we created our care experienced cookbook, which breaks down easy recipes such as how to boil an egg, how to make pasta, all the way to meals that can be batch-cooked, desserts and snacks.
We even broke down the simplest things that seem obvious but that aren’t always. Things like:
- gas mark temperature conversions
- how much each meal costs to make
- how many portions you can make in a batch
- what equipment you might need
- how long it can be frozen for
We really wanted this to make a difference. Now any young person in Sunderland who moves into their own property will receive a free copy of our cookbook to get them started.
We also created started kits for kitchen essentials – speices, slat and pepper, oil etc, which our young people will also receive when they move out.
This means that the young people of Sunderland are better prepared to cook healthy, budget-friendly meals which can bee cooked in bath and frozen rather than struggling in the kitchen.
We also sell our cookbooks at events and to professionals to continue to raise money to restock the books when needed.