Okehampton Community Kitchen received a Food, Fuel and More large grant of £15,000 at the end of 2023 to provide support to people experiencing acute emergency need in and around Okehampton.
The grant is being used to purchase and distribute items such as blankets, warm socks, recipe packs, air fryers and supermarket vouchers. Rebecca Green, from Okehampton Community Kitchen, said she could have spent the money “10 times over”.
Rebecca explained how the small, grassroots organisation focuses on working in consultation with the community to discover what will help them the most. “We listen to what they actually want rather than what we think they want.” As an example, they heard that people from ethnic minority communities often could not eat the food provided by food support agencies. So Okehampton Community Kitchen has worked with these communities to develop suitable recipe packs.
They also discovered a high demand for good quality warm socks – a necessity in the cold, wet months but something that people cannot afford to buy when budgets are stretched.
The community kitchen has worked hard to engage with the under-served communities that this grant programme was targeting. This has included talking to doctors, health visitors and schools, and having a regular presence in the foyer of the local Lidl on the first Saturday of every month. Rebecca said that this proactive engagement, along with a savvy approach to spending the grant money, has already enabled them to reach many more people than they had originally planned.
Rebecca explained that the community kitchen does not often apply for grants, relying instead on donations in kind, because the team struggles with application forms. One of our grant managers, Vanessa, worked closely with Rebecca to support her through the process of applying. Without this help, Rebecca said that she would not have applied and the project would not have existed.
Rebecca said that the process of applying for and administering the grant has boosted their confidence, adding “A huge positive has been seeing how the community has responded.”
