Over the last six months, we’ve been working with Unity Works, an organisation supporting people with learning disabilities to gain skills, achieve qualifications and secure jobs.

We began working together to meet our borough’s need for halal and vegetarian-cooked meals. Their nutritious and delicious meals have been hugely popular with our food bank users and meet a demand for diet-specific pre-prepared meals. In return, Unity Work’s catering trainees learn valuable skills and experience they can use in their future careers – a win-win for both our charities.

The project has been such a success. Unity Works has been supporting its trainees to develop new skills by cooking hot meals in a hygienic and safe working kitchen. Whilst we have benefitted enormously from the provision of 50 nutritious and tasty cooked halal and vegetarian meals that are distributed to our Food Bank Users each week.

One Somalian mother with seven children struggles to afford halal meat, so these hot meals help introduce a healthy, prepared halal meal into the children’s diet and give the mother some respite from cooking and chores.

The project has even been shortlisted for LNER’s Customer and Community Investment Fund! Funding will enable 2,500 meals to be distributed to approximately 5,000 of our food bank users.

If you have a spare moment, please vote to fund Unity Work’s “360 Degrees Good Food” project under the Education & Employability theme. You can vote here (voting closes Sunday, 23rd of October).