BLACK* Artists On The Move is a national arts development agency that supports black artists of all backgrounds and practices who are committed to excellence. They deliver a range of training programmes for artists focused on equality and decolonisation, run festivals and longer term initiatives in schools and community settings.

Travelling across the UK, their multidisciplinary team supports writers, theatres, dancers, musical artists, visual artists, digital artists, live artists and artists using craft traditions.

At their annual gathering, artists from all different backgrounds come together to immerse themselves in creativity and share current thinking, strategies and opportunities. It is also where they finalise their programme of work for the year ahead.

BLACK* Artists on the Move worked with us on our third cookbook, Secret Dishes From Around the World 3. They commissioned the fantastic artist Magdalena Julius Swallow to create a multimedia artwork for the project.

North Bristol Foodbank is an organisation seeded by the Trussell Trust that provides invaluable services to the local community. They help individuals and families in crisis, through the provision of emergency food supplies. 

We worked with North Bristol 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.

The Bristol Food Network is a collaborative organisation coordinating community projects across Bristol with the aim of improving food security and sustainability in the city. As an essentially sustainable enterprise, the Bristol Food Network champions local food production and independent trade, promoting Community Supported Agriculture and composting of food waste. The organisation’s annual ‘Get Growing’ Garden Trail scheme encourages locals and visitors to seek out the city’s growing spaces, from small urban allotments to vast fields of arable land. The organisation’s cookery courses and gardening workshops encourage locals to live and eat sustainably all year round. Thanks to the efforts of the Bristol Food Network, Bristol was recently awarded Gold Sustainable Food City status by the Sustainable Food Places Board.

We would also like to applaud the work of Bristol’s Aid Box Community – a charity offering supplies and refuge for the city’s asylum seekers. The organisation began in 2015 as the Aid Box Convoy, providing refugees in Dunkirk with tents, sleeping bags and parcels of food, and was permanently established in Bristol in 2016 as a sanctuary for those displaced from their homes. The organisation runs a free shop in Cotham offering clothes, food and household items to those in need and creating an opportunity for recent arrivals to settle into their local community and meet others in a similar position to themselves. The organisation also runs activity groups in arts and crafts, yoga, cycling, sewing and football in partnership with organisations such as Bristol Yoga Roots Project and Open Mind Active, building a sense of community and comradeship amongst Bristol’s recent refugees and residents alike.

Our Community Cookery School team visited Bristol as part of the Secret Dishes From Around the World book tour in 2021. Whilst we were there, we spoke to Akulah Agbami, director of BLACK* Artists On The Move, the organisation who worked with us on the Tanzanian section of the cookbook. You can listen to the interview on our Share Your Secrets podcast, which is available for free via Spotify, Google and Apple!