Arty-Folks inspires adults who feel at a low point in life and are struggling with mental health challenges to realise their full potential and lead fulfilling lives through the visual arts and peer support.

Covid-19 didn’t stop them from doing what they love most – connecting and creating with their members. Mental stress is a very human reaction to distressing life situations and Arty-Folks believes that sometimes we need to support each other to push through.  They bring people together to share life experiences and through the creative process they help them strengthen identity and control over their lives and futures.

Arty-Folks worked with us on our third cookbook, Secret Dishes From Around the World 3. They collaboratively collected images and created collages and mixed-media artworks for the project.

Coventry 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 Coventry 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.

The Coventry Food Union is a city-wide social enterprise managed by the Pod Café on Far Gosford Street seeking to establish a platform for local activists and to encourage residents to confront food poverty across Coventry through coordinated community action. The Food Union offers a means for residents to exchange home-grown food at their ‘Crop Swap’ events, and promotes community solidarity with its ‘Song and Soil’ campfire singalongs and Story Circle project. Meanwhile, the Food Union’s ‘Master Gardeners’ project has drawn attention to the sustainable work of Coventry’s gardeners and allotmenteers by interviewing locals who have held allotments in the city for over twenty-five years. By celebrating sustainable food production through art, photography, music and trade, the Food Union hopes to inspire residents to question the inefficiency and wastefulness of our current system of food production.

We would also like to draw attention to the work of the Coventry Roma Project, confronting discrimination and hate crimes against the Roma community throughout Coventry. The project has been running since 2010, and in that time has delivered cultural awareness classes to 227 professionals including local police officers and the chairs of Coventry’s Safeguarding Children Partnership. Sustainability is an important factor in the achievements of the Roma Project, which has orchestrated urban growing programs to foster cross-cultural communication amongst Coventry’s Roma and non-Roma residents, and participated in 2021’s ‘Roma: Recycle-Reuse-Reimagine’ project, collaborating with over fifty Roma community members. The project has strong ties with Britain’s Romanian Embassy, and deals with approximately one hundred cases of discrimination and exploitation every month.

Our Community Cookery School team visited Coventry as part of the Secret Dishes From Around the World book tour in 2021. Whilst we were there, we spoke to Lorella Medici from Arty-Folks, who collaboratively created collages and mixed-media artworks for the Haitian section of the book. You can listen to the interview on our Share Your Secrets podcast, which is available for free via Spotify, Google and Apple!