Interested in cooking? Here's an opportunity to work with a leading food poverty organisation to change the lives of participants and even improve your own kitchen skills!
**VIRTUAL COURSES STARTING ON A WEEKLY BASIS FROM 19/06/2020 - START AT A TIME CONVENIENT FOR YOU**
Bags of Taste is an award winning food education programme working with people in food poverty to improve their diets, finances and physical and mental wellbeing.
We’re very successful at changing what people eat, giving thousands of people the tools they need to move away from regularly buying takeaways and ready meals to cooking tasty and nutritous home-cooked food from around the world on a budget!
We need mentor cooks to guide our students through our new virtual courses. Could that be you? Please get in touch!
Interested in cooking, helping others cook healthy food on a budget, and connecting with people?
Bags of Taste is an award-winning food education programme helping participants change their diets to improve their finances, physical and mental wellbeing by cooking tasty, healthy, take-away beating meals from scratch for just £1 a head. Now our free cooking and food budgeting classes have gone virtual. Instead of hands on teaching we are delivering our courses virtually via WhattsApp, Facebook, email and phone, and we provide participants with free ingredients to help them to complete the course.
We need volunteer cook mentors to guide students through a short virtual course incorporating essential cooking skills, carefully selected recipes and meal planning tips using the trademark ingredients bags that we deliver to their homes. Over the 2 week "virtual course", volunteer cook mentors are responsible for keeping in contact with a small group of ‘students’ in a friendly chat, providing practical and moral support, cooking guidance, motivation, feedback and encouragement, and managing peer to peer interaction. This may be one to one over the phone, or on social media/email. We provide full training and online resources, and you are always supported by an experienced member of staff.
We also need volunteers to deliver essential ingredient bags to participants - if you have a car or other mode of transport good for delivering shopping this is a really great way you can help out. This will involve collecting between 1-3 bags from S8 9EH and transporting them to the homes of the participants.
Mentoring students and guiding them through the material is really essential to them being able to complete the course and learn valuable life changing skills - your role is incredibly important!
As a volunteer you can join our amazing facebook group where you can watch our course tutors doing live cooking demonstrations and where you will have access to all of our delicous recipes from around the world specially designed to be tasty, affordable and simple to make!
If this sounds like something you'd enjoy please get in touch!
** Virtual courses will be starting on a weekly basis from 19/06/2020 onwards so start at a time convenient for you**
* Please note that fluency in English is essential to the mentoring role; if your English is not fluent you can still help out with delivering essential ingredient bags to students. *
What skills do I need?
An interest in cooking is advantageous - you don't need to be a Master Chef- just able to follow simple recipes. Having good communication skills as well as an outgoing, open-minded personality and a willingness to chat are essential, as is sensitivity towards people living with hardship (potentially including physical and mild learning difficulties).
Fluency in English is essential to the mentoring role, however the bag delivery is open to anyone.
What will I gain?
On top of satisfaction in the knowledge that you’re an essential part of an award-winning project tackling food poverty, health inequality and social isolation, you will be a supportive and encouraging voice in someone's life helping them to make a meaningful change.
It is an opportunity to make some new friends either with other volunteers or participants on the course.
You can also join our wonderful facebook community where you will have access to all the Bags of Taste recipes from around the world - all of which are tasty, nutritous, simple to make and can be cooked on a small budget!
Training and support
You will be given all the training and support you will need. Before the mentoring starts - you will read our guide to mentoring and the mentoring scripts. All the mentors can join our volunteer facebook group and volunteer WhatsApp group to share thoughts, ideas and questions. The programme lead (Clio) will be there to support you throughout should you have any uncertainties, questions or difficulties at all.
Time commitment
Volunteer mentors will need to commit to mentoring their students through a complete course, this takes two weeks and around an hour of your time each week. After the student(s) have completed the course you can choose to start again straight away, take a break or stop completely.
DBS (criminal records) check
No
Location
The courses are provided remotely via WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, phone or email.