HEALTHY LIVING CENTRE DARTFORD - HEALTH AND WELLBEING

from Dartford Living August 2023

THE EXPANDING PRACTICE TEAM

Our Hatchlings Cookery Course encourages 8–12-year-olds to throw away the recipe book and learn to cook with what is available. Each week starts with a dish in mind, but the children choose what (and how much) of each ingredient they want to include in their dish. This encourages confidence and creativity in the kitchen, and the young people are always eager to taste their culinary creations!

Our aim at Healthy Living Centre Dartford is to reduce health inequalities and improve health and wellbeing in our local community. We achieve this by delivering and facilitating projects that offer a range of opportunities for training, volunteering, social interaction, and community engagement.

Many of our projects involve food. During the Covid-19 pandemic we delivered Dartford Larder, a membership scheme that redistributed surplus food to the local community. We also worked with Dartford Borough Council to deliver food provisions to vulnerable and shielding residents.

Since the pandemic, our journey to reduce food waste continues. As a Fareshare Go partner, our wonderful volunteers collect donations of perfectly good, useable produce from local supermarkets which would otherwise end up in landfill. Shops cannot sell produce after the “Best Before Date,” and we prefer to follow the ‘Look, Smell, Taste’ idea to check the quality!

We share these donations at our social groups – Community Hubs, Hygge on the Hill, and Tree Bingo – for visitors to take home or share at the group with a cuppa.

Our ‘Chop and Chatter’ Cookery Club makes clever use of these donations to create a delicious main and dessert course every week. The group is really varied in age and ability and kitchen tasks shared between them to produce something amazing - that we all sit together and enjoy for lunch.

Our monthly Tree Community Lunch brings together local people to enjoy a delicious home cooked two course meal, tea, and good company. And the breakfast offered at our Community Hub is very reasonably priced and a great excuse to stop and chat for a while.

In September we will be offering FREE Slow Cooking courses to enable participants to confidently cook their own nutritious, easy, economical meals. The course will be full of other useful hints and tips to cook a wide variety of dishes and - like our Hatchlings Course -we hope to enable participants to be confident to adapt each recipe according to what is available and the likes/needs of their family.

As well as our cookery clubs, we also regularly cook for other organisations. The charity Porchlight have a weekly Drop-In session at Temple Hill Community Centre where we provide a hearty meal for any of their clients who come in for advice.

Of course, throughout the year we are incredibly grateful to our community allotmenteers for providing fruit and vegetables for all our cookery sessions and for visitors to the centres to take home.

Home grown, fresh and local – you just cannot beat it!

We are also always looking for volunteers to help support our cookery sessions – if you think you could help or you would like any information on any of the cookery sessions we have – please email us: info@hlcdartford.org.uk or call us on 01322 311265.

You can find Healthy Living Centre Dartford activities at both Tree Estate and Temple Hill Community Centres, where our team of friendly volunteers and staff will be happy to welcome you. For all our most up-to-date information follow us on Facebook or Instagram.

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