Family Arts Network Sunderland is a collaborative project involving arts and culture organisations across the city, alongside non arts organisations that work with families. They come together as a Network to promote family friendly arts activity and spaces for families in Sunderland, making it a great place for families to have fun and feel safe. They also work closely with the organisation More than Grandparents which is run by and for kinship carers and their families.

The aim is to increase the involvement of local families in creative activities, from craft to music to performing arts, and make the experience of going to a family event in Sunderland a fantastic one!

Family Arts Network Sunderland worked with us on our third cookbook, Secret Dishes From Around the World 3. They commissioned the artist Hannah Rich to work alongside a group of talented creatives aged from 18 months to 11 years old  to create a mixed-media artwork for the project.

Sunderland Foodbank and South Tyneside 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 Sunderland Foodbank and South Tyneside 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 mission of My Sisters’ Kitchen is to provide training, employment and sense of belonging to some of the most disadvantaged women in Sunderland. They work alongside women who live with ‘multiple disadvantage’ – women experiencing domestic abuse who are more than likely experiencing other forms of social and economic disadvantage such as poverty, unemployment, crime and poor mental health.

As one of our Partner VCSE organisations, My Sister’s Kitchen are able to offer the women they support free places on our cookery workshops, cookalongs and national learning programmes. They are also able to provide their beneficiaries with free access to the recipes & resources on our Cooking & Nutrition Portal – helping them to build towards a positive future.

We also admire the work of Sunderland Community Soup Kitchen – a local, independently-run kitchen supplying free food for the hungry without need for referral. The kitchen prioritises home-style cooking, preparing healthy takeaway meals and regularly adjusting its menu, from curries and frittatas to jacket potatoes and apple crumble. The kitchen also runs a warehouse, where customers can donate and exchange tinned goods, and has established ties with the city council and local supermarkets to ensure that surplus food is given to those who need it instead of thrown away. To encourage healthy eating and self-sufficiency, the kitchen owns an allotment plot complete with a recently built greenhouse to grow fresh, home-grown produce, and regularly takes donations from local allotmenteers to incorporate into their recipes.

We would also like to draw attention to the work of Sunderland’s Wearside Women in Need, which has coordinated accessible community services for women and children suffering from abuse for almost forty years. Between 2020 and 2021, Wearside Women in Need received over 2,700 referrals and accommodated as many as 72 women and 62 children, giving refuge to women and children living in abusive households. The organisation conducts outreach from its offices in the city centre, where Independent Domestic Violence Advocates offer one-on-one support to women dealing with domestic abuse, online abuse and cyber-stalking. Wearside Women in Need also operates a helpline, which received over 1,300 enquiries between 2021 and 2022, and offers a counselling service run by professional counsellors qualified to work on issues such as depression, bereavement, abuse and anxiety.

Our Community Cookery School team visited Sunderland as part of the Secret Dishes From Around the World book tour in 2021. Whilst we were there, we spoke to Karen Gray and Karen Davidson from More Than Grandparents, an organisation that work closely with Family Arts Network Sunderland. The Family Arts Network commissioned artist Hannah Rich to create a vibrant design for the Malaysian section of the cookbook. You can listen to these conversations on our Share Your Secrets podcast, which is available for free via Spotify, Google and Apple!