Aviva Community Fund provided £5,013 of match funding
Help us Tackle Holiday Hunger this Summer
Manchester, England, United Kingdom
Aim
Support our Community Cookery School teams as they distribute meals and provide activities for families living in food poverty this summer.
Nobody Should Go Hungry in the UK
This summer, our Community Cookery School teams will continue to distribute meals to those most in need of support and provide activities for families living in food poverty. We are raising money to run 5 additional Summer Holiday Cookery Club Programmes in the school holidays. We are also aiming to distribute an additional 2,000 hot nutritious meals to vulnerable people during August.
Choose from our range of crowdfunding rewards that enable you to pledge directly to our Community Meal Drives, fund Summer Holiday Cookery Club outreach work or support the wider work of our non-profit organisation by selecting one of our fundraising gifts that give twice!
Fighting Food Poverty since 2014
Bounceback Food CIC is a social enterprise fighting food poverty on multiple fronts. Our Community Cookery School teams teach people how to cook, run food bank drives at market events, help people get jobs in the food sector and coordinate community meal drives that provide emergency meals for our beneficiaries.
Our mission to fight food poverty has become even more urgent in light of the ongoing Cost of Living crisis, with food insecurity levels and food bank usage soaring. Here are just a few of the reasons why food poverty continues to matter in the UK:
- Since 2018, there has been a 49% increase in the number of children who are dependent on food banks in the UK. (Source: Environmental Audit Committee’s Hunger, Food Insecurity and Malnutrition in the UK Report)
- 3% of families in the UK - at least 2.1 million people - used a food bank in the year to March 2023. (Source: The Trussell Trust)
- Almost 90% of independent food banks reported increased demand in January 2023 compared with a year earlier. (Source: The Independent Food Aid Network - Ifan)
Our Social Impact
Since 2014 we have taught 9,000+ people how to cook, including stroke survivors, young carers, food bank beneficiaries and elderly people living in sheltered accommodation. We have also secured 20,000+ donations to food banks and generated over 220,000 meals for people in need via our catering, community meal drives and cookery workshops.
Prior to the pandemic our outreach work was mainly delivered in the North West, Wales and Cheshire but given the increasing scale of food poverty and the Cost of Living crisis, we've since been focused on building an organisation capable of helping people across the country.
Expanding Nationwide
By November 2026 Bounceback Food CIC will have 20 teams operating in the UK’s largest towns and cities in the UK and be supporting people living in food poverty by:
- Ensuring their nearest foodbank is stocked with good quality items of food & hygiene products.
- Providing them with the opportunity to learn how to cook for free and supporting them with career progression in the food industry.
- Providing free hot nutritious meals from/via permanent Community Kitchens.
- Enabling them to learn about cooking, budgeting, nutrition, meal planning, reducing food waste, gain accredited skills and book on to cooking classes with the provision of free access to our Cooking & Nutrition Portal.
Our central team, freelancers and volunteers are all now focussed on achieving these goals.
We are always looking for volunteers to support the development of our organisation too and so if you'd like to support us in that way keep an eye on our social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & LinkedIn) or sign up to our mailing list to stay updated.
What Will the Money be Used For?
Target 1: Meal Drives, Summer Holiday Cooking Clubs & Resource Distribution
Our first target of £25,000 will raise the funds required to:
- Deliver 5 additional Summer Holiday Cooking Clubs (4 in Greater Manchester, 1 available nationally online) inclusive of supporting participants with ingredients & utensil costs where required.
- Prep, cook and distribute a further 2,000 hot nutritious meals to vulnerable people during the summer holidays. These will be fulfilled by our Community Cookery School teams across the UK.
- Update our Cooking & Nutrition Portal so that our VCSE partners can access centrally produced resources and activities to lead Bounceback created activities on a local level.
Target 2: Community Cookery Essentials, Catering Equipment & Service Expansion
If we hit our first target, we will then aim to raise an additional £25,000 which will enable us to:
- Purchase the Community Cookery School equipment (hobs, aprons etc) required to increase the number of cookery workshops & meal drives that our teams are capable of delivering.
- Buy the catering equipment our teams require to increase delivery capacity and strengthen our resilience to deliver services in a recessionary environment.
- Develop a range of new community cookery workshops that will help fund year-round provision of our core outreach work nationally (meal provision and cookery workshops for our beneficiaries).
Make an Impact this Summer
Choose from our range of crowdfunding rewards that enable you to pledge directly to our Community Meal Drives, fund Summer Holiday Cookery Club outreach work or support the wider work of our non-profit organisation by selecting one of our fundraising gifts that give twice!
Our exciting range of fundraising gifts, also sold via our online shop and at market events, are helping us to counter the financial challenges created by the pandemic and build a strong nationwide non-profit organisation capable of meeting the increased demand for our services.
With your support we will be able to tackle holiday hunger on a much bigger scale across the UK this summer.
This project successfully funded on 6th August 2024