vegan UK

October 16th is World Food Day – and what better date for Made In Hackney, an award winning eco-community kitchen and cookery school to launch a crowdfunding campaign to raise £45,000 – with a stretch target of £85,000. Since opening in 2012 the small but dynamic organisation has helped over 6000 Londoners lead healthier, happier more environmentally sustainable lives. They have achieved this by offering healthy eating focused cookery and food growing classes to groups in need including young people leaving care, low income families, people with long term health problems, recovering addicts and people with learning difficulties.

The team behind Made in Hackney have launched a campaign on Crowdfunder.co.uk to raise £45,000 to secure the organisations future and ensure they can help more people, in more parts of London to take part in their life changing programme.

The project and the team’s approach has been praised in high profile media such as Jamie, Vogue, The Observer, Vegetarian Living and Vegan Trade Journal. And that’s where it gets really interesting. The cookery school has a local, seasonal, organic (when possible), 100% plant-based food policy. Radical stuff.

Sarah Bentley, the kitchen’s founder says, “We teach people how to cook and eat food that is not just good for their health – but also the health of the planet. Everyone knows we need to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables and less processed foods, sugar and meat – but most people don’t know where to start. Many don’t even know how to cook from scratch at all and especially how to prepare vegetables in an exciting, tasty way. That’s where we come in.”

The project has taken their programme into schools, children’s centres, youth centres and pensioners clubs across the capital and worked with a number of national and local organisations such as Action For Children, Off Centre, Age UK, Deaf Plus, East London Vision, the Salvation Army, the Women’s Environment Network and Public Health Hackney.

According to their 2016 impact statistics they’re programme really brings about meaningful change. After completing the Made In Hackney programme 90% of participants said they felt more confident cooking from scratch using fresh ingredients and healthy cookery techniques; 90% said they now ate more fresh fruits and vegetables; and all participants felt inspired and had the necessary skills and recipes to eat less meat.

With spiralling levels of lifestyle related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity – local programmes such as this are essential to prevent and in some cases cure, a plethora of chronic illnesses.

Rupy Aujla, author of Doctors Kitchen food blog, practising GP and volunteer for Made In Hackney says. “Made In Hackney is the blueprint for how we should be tackling and preventing a wide range of illnesses largely brought on by poor diet. They do fantastic work and have made a huge difference to thousands of people’s lives. It’s essential we secure their future. Donate to them today.”

A word from Fat Gay Vegan:

As you can tell, the above is a press release sent to me for publishing.

It gives you a lot of information about Made in Hackney but I wanted to add some of my own words to this post.

The work carried out by Made in Hackney is crucial. Not just warm and fuzzy, but crucial. They are doing incredible outreach in one of the most polarised locations in the UK when it comes to wealth disparity and access to nutritious food options.

The people they are helping are marginalised and placed in situations where they do not have equitable access to quality food.

They are supporting at-risk members of their community and they are doing it only with plant-derived ingredients.

If you donate to just one campaign this month, please consider if it can be Made in Hackney.

Click here to donate to the campaign if you have the funds and please share this blog or the link to the campaign.