The GAP is a small arts education organisation based in Birmingham. They deliver a range of multi-art form projects that create space and time for young people to make sense of the world through creative and cultural action.

Their public venue in Balsall Heath hosts exhibitions, performances, workshops, social events and more, supporting local community members of all ages and backgrounds to come together for conversation and cultural exchange. Here they also run The MIX Community Café and associated food-related activities, including cookery courses run by and for young asylum seekers and free Iftah meal deliveries during the pandemic.

The GAP Arts Project worked with us on our third cookbook, Secret Dishes From Around the World 3. They commissioned the fantastic artist Bayan Moradi to create a digital artwork for the project.

Birmingham Central Foodbank and Smethwick Foodbank are organisations seeded by the Trussell Trust that provide invaluable services to the local community. They help individuals and families in crisis, through the provision of emergency food supplies. 

We worked with Smethwick Foodbank and Birmingham Central Foodbank during our 2021 Reverse Advent Calendar Campaign. The project encouraged people to donate a specific item to their local food bank every day leading up to Christmas. We created a resource hub on our website with information about food banks across the country and promoted our free donation tracker to help people support their local food bank.

Thrive Together Birmingham is another social enterprise that has done great work tackling food poverty all across the city. Thrive Together is a collaborative movement encouraging cooperation amongst local charities and faith communities to achieve social change on a grassroots level. In 2020, Thrive Together’s #feedbirmingham campaign collected 60,000 items of food in coalition with 192 organisations across Birmingham, supporting over 800,000 people in times of crisis and demonstrating the transformative possibilities of extensive community organising. Thrive Together has been particularly influential in supporting the Your Local Pantry project, in which locals pay a small fee in return for food supplies of their own choosing and community support in the café waiting area, going beyond the model of a typical foodbank to establish a longer-term response to food poverty.

We also respect the work of Handsworth Helping Hands – an independent organisation dedicated to improving everyday life in Handsworth, Birmingham. The organisation is run by seven committee members and backed by as many as 500 volunteers, who have together coordinated countless litter-picking campaigns and street clean-ups. The charity works to recycle of litter, fly-tipped furniture and other donated materials, and encourages the community to plant flowers and foliage in public spaces and take pride in their city. As a community organisation, volunteers help residents to care for their gardens and carry out maintenance and repair jobs for those unable to do so themselves. By checking on the elderly, the vulnerable and those living alone, Handsworth Helping Hands makes sure that everyone has the neighbourly support they need.

Our Community Cookery School team visited Birmingham as part of the Secret Dishes From Around the World book tour in 2021. While we were there we spoke to the artist Bayan Moradi, who created a piece of artwork for the Iranian section of the cookbook, influenced by her childhood memories. We also spoke to Ella Marshall, who runs the GAP Arts Project, the organisation we commissioned to complete the artwork. You can listen to both interviews on our Share Your Secrets podcast which is available for free via Spotify, Google and Apple!