Showing posts with label Summer Academy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Summer Academy. Show all posts

Thursday 25 July 2019

Great opportunity for 11-18 year olds at Sufra Summer Academy


From Sufra NW London (Ed: This is brilliant!)

The Summer Academy is our latest AQA accredited course aimed at young people between 11-18 years of age who have an interest in food – whether it’s eating it, growing it or cooking it!
The week-long course will be taught from our kitchen as well as on St. Raphael’s Edible Garden, and is designed to give participants a deeper insight into the principles of healthy eating, food preparation and horticulture. The course runs from Monday to Friday, with a free day-trip to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew on the Wednesday.

It’s a fun and engaging course that will help develop self-esteem and confidence, whilst also teaching young people to cook a range of nutritious meals. We provide additional support with literacy, numeracy and CV writing where necessary – which could open up routes into future employment or apprenticeships in the gardening or catering industries.

Course dates and times

We have two courses running over the summer holidays:
  • Monday 19th, Tuesday 20th, Thursday 22nd and Friday 23rd August 2019, from 10am to 5pm
  • Monday 26th, Tuesday 27th, Thursday 29th and Friday 30th August 2019, from 10am to 5pm
Notice: Please be aware that there will be no classes on Wednesdays.
If you are interested in enrolling, please download and compete the Registration Form (see link below) and return it to admin@sufra-nwlondon.org.uk
If you have any questions, please email us or call 020 3441 1335

 

Wednesday 29 July 2015

Sufra food growing, fresh veg collection and cooking opportunities

 
Work starts ar St Raphael's Edible Garden

From Sufra NW London

Today Marks & Spencer launches a national campaign called Spark Something Good, which aims to encourage people to take action for social good. Over the next 24 hours, 24 projects across the capital will be transformed – and the derelict site on St. Raphael’s Estate is one of these projects.

Across the day, M&S employees will be joined by our own volunteers, as well as volunteers from Sudbury Town Resident’s Association and Brent Housing Partnership to clean up the site, build raised beds and plant the first seeds of what will become one of the largest communal food growing spaces in North-West London. We do aim high, don’t we!

It’s going to be a manic day, with volunteers working onsite till 10pm tonight. For regular updates on what’s happening on site, make sure you follow us on Twitter.

Fruit & Vegetable Collection Pilot

On the subject of food growing, tenants at Birchen Grove and Bridge Road allotments will notice that some unusually bright yellow bins have appeared on site. Across August and September we’re piloting a new initiative, encouraging allotment-holders to donate fresh produce to the food bank.

Every year, many tenants find that a successful harvest quickly turns miserable at the sight of wasted fruit and vegetables, which are surplus to their need. To reduce food wastage, and ensure that we can help vulnerable people maintain a healthy diet, we’re offering tenants the opportunity to share their harvest with Sufra.

Collections from both allotments will be on Tuesday mornings, so it’s best to pick your harvest as close as possible to the collection day. There are separate bins for soft and hard fruits/vegetables because there is nothing more depressing than an overgrown marrow landing head-first on a pile of tomatoes.

And Fahim will not be impressed, when he has to clean out the bins. Please don’t upset Fahim.

Summer Academy

Keeping with the food growing theme, we’ve had a lot of enquiries about our Summer Academy, an intergenerational project that celebrates food growing and experimental cooking. Each session includes a visit to Sudbury Court Drive Allotment where participants harvest fresh produce (courtesy of Michael and Patrick’s frantic efforts since early February) and return to Sufra to cook a delicious meal.

What’s more, there are no chefs and no recipes! It’s truly experimental and a chance for people to learn cooking skills from one another. Or watch, and be entertained. The Summer Academy is open to young people aged 11-19 years and older people aged 60+ years... but we’re happy to slip in a few eager beavers. You can attend as many or as few sessions as you like, so why not give it a try?

The sessions run from 10am to 4pm on: Tuesday 4 August, Thursday 6 August, Tuesday 11 August and Thursday 13 August. To take part, download a Registration Form here. There are no spaces remaining on the first session (sorry, but you should have registered early!).

Food Academy for Young Carers

Sometimes experimental cooking doesn’t quite hit the mark!

We know that many young people who care for a disabled or unwell parent or sibling, often face the challenge of having to cook for the family. In partnership with Brent Carers Centre, we’re organising a special week-long Food Academy for young carers from Monday 24 August to Friday 28 August.

Across the week, young carers will learn how to cook 10 different dishes, as part of an accredited certificate in cooking. We’ve also thrown in a visit to King’s Cross Skip Garden (we’re really getting into this food growing malarkey) and a workshop on healthy eating run by a nutritionist. Participants who complete the accredited outcomes will be treated to a night out at Jimmy’s Restaurant at Wembley Outlet Centre to sample a world buffet.

If you know a young carer who would benefit from the course, get in touch or download a Registration Form here.

Thursday 16 July 2015

15 tonnes of food collected by Sufra NW London during Ramadan


Congratulations to Sufra NW London who have sent me this news:

Yesterday the title of this email was 10 tonnes. But in the last 24 hours is has evolved to exceed 15 tonnes. Well, 15.442 tonnes to be precise. That’s how much food has been raised in the last month, thanks to the generosity of the local Muslim community during the month of Ramadan, which comes to a close this weekend.

It's been competitive and we've heard stories of hanky-panky antics at local mosques. Scroll down for more...

Building St. Raphael’s Edible Garden

We’ll soon be unveiling the landscape design for our new food growing project on St. Raphael’s Estate!

To be the first to see the design (and our new water supply which is being installed next week) we need a little help clearing the final debris on the site in preparation for the first raised beds and planting.

The final clear-up will take place on Saturday and Sunday 25/26 July and you’re welcome to join us for just a few hours or the whole day. There will be plenty of pizza and refreshments so make sure you register for the lunch-time slot on the rota! We’re also hiring a rotavator (it’s basically a plough with the horse replaced by a motor) so if you know how to use one, please get in touch.

To volunteer for the clean-up weekend, click here.

A yet to be disclosed local company is sending over a carpenter to run a workshop for 20 people on how to build raised beds on Wednesday 29 July, with the first plants hitting the soil on the same day.

If you want to go down in history for the planting the first tomato plant, click here. Although you should probably sign up for the clean-up as well. You have to do some graft for the glory.

Colleen & Matt Take the #FoodParcelChallenge

Our two friends from MyLotto24 have decided to live for 5 days on a typical food bank parcel from next week to experience the reality of food poverty in the UK (for those who manage to get to the food bank!). Check out our Facebook and Twitter accounts for daily updates on how they’re getting on.

They’re also raising money for the food bank, so show your love and sponsor them here.

Remember, you can do the #FoodParcelChallenge any time of the year! All you have to do is pick a week, let us know, and we’ll send you a typical food parcel.

Together, let’s raise awareness of the tragedy of food poverty in the community. For more information on how to take part, click here.

Summer Academy

If you missed last year’s Summer Academy, it’s back! (in partnership with Innisfree Housing Association and the Head Start programme run by the Challenge)

The Summer Academy is an intergenerational project that celebrates food growing and experimental cooking. Across 4 glorious sessions, we’ll visit Sudbury Court Drive Allotment to harvest fresh produce (courtesy of Michael and Patrick’s frantic efforts since early February) to cook a delicious meal (well, that’s open to interpretation). Though I must confess, Jim’s Irish potatoes are to die for. Quite literally, when you think about how much butter goes into them.

What’s more, there are no chefs and no recipes! It’s truly experimental and a chance for people to learn cooking skills from one another. Or watch, and be entertained. Last year, Tanzeel used a blender for the first time, and got strawberry milkshake all over his face.

The Summer Academy is open to young people aged 11-19 years and older people aged 60+ years... but we’re happy to slip in a few eager beavers. You can attend as many or as few sessions as you like, so why not give it a try?

The sessions run from 10am to 4pm on: Tuesday 4 August, Thursday 6 August, Tuesday 11 August and Thursday 13 August. To take part, download a Registration Form here.

Ramadan Food Collections

It’s been a vicious month as local mosques have competed and sweated to outbid one another in their generosity. There’s also been a little hanky-panky with bags of rice disappearing from one mosque and emerging at another and the mysterious 500g packs of lentils from ******* Mosque, which weighed over 3kg. The perennial rivalry between Harrow Mosque and Stanmore Mosque was settled in the early hours of the morning, each congregation raising 3,600kg and 4,058kg respectively. This year’s newest contender, Hendon Mosque, raked in 1,852kg in one night!

Our stock rooms are bursting to the brim, and we are very grateful to all those who supported our food collections during Ramadan, including the many individuals and families who visited us with their donations.

We’re also grateful to Pick & Save on Kenton Road for donating 1,300kg of sugar and pasta and Waitrose and Marks & Spencer in Brent Cross who have set up temporary collection points until Sunday 9 August.

We’re Moving In

It’s taken a while, but our newly refurbished building is almost ready. It’s looking amazing (if I might say so).

Over the next week or so, we’ll be shifting all our services across. There’s been a lot of excitement around the new building, so if you’d like to come and visit us, get in touch, and we’ll arrange a private viewing.

Linguists (or speakers of other languages) Needed

Following last week's appeal, some truly talented linguists (and some more dubious) have been busy translating our Food Lists into different languages. And they keep coming in! In fact, I can just see Ali's Arabic translation in my inbox now.

Over 120 languages are spoken in North West London and there's still a few prominent languages we need to account for. So if you speak (and type) any of the following, we want to hear from you:

Gujarati, Urdu/Hindi, Tamil, Russian, Romanian and Somali

And finally…

We’d like to wish our Muslim donors and supporters, a joyous Eid al-Fitr. Thank you for your generosity throughout Ramadan.