As a community garden and kitchen, The Outback has food at its heart and is driven by the principle that fresh, nutritious food should be accessible to all. Many of the projects and initiatives that run from The Outback are based around promoting healthy eating, education and nutrition.

This year the team at The Outback have been working alongside Halifax Academy to provide weekly healthy meal bags to families from the school who are interested in improving their cooking skills and knowledge so they can provide healthy, nutritious but cost-effective family meals. Each Friday, families receive a bag packed full of healthy ingredients to make one full homecooked family meal over the weekend, complete with recipe card and instructions. We also add plenty of fruit to the bags for healthy snacks for the week. The project was made possible with the support of external funding from DEFRA and the Power to Change ‘Sehat’ project.

The recipes are created by Community Organiser, Alison Jones, who has a wealth of experience in cooking nutritious and delicious meals with the local community. All recipes are carefully thought through to ensure they can be prepared in any kitchen requiring only basic cooking equipment and have been developed with input from her Park Ward community cooking group to create and supply recipes that local families will enjoy.

The success of the project has led to further development of the collaboration with Halifax Academy who are now looking to set up a community kitchen onsite at the academy. Plans are underway to set up a community kitchen at the Halifax Academy school, with the support of Alison Jones and volunteers from the Park Ward community cooking group. The team have based their model on a separate, successful initiative also running from The Outback; our Tuesday takeaway meals service. The takeaway meals service provides a hot nutritional lunch to members of the local community experiencing financial difficulties.

Alison is working alongside staff in the school to establish a similar scheme on the school site, supported by volunteers – many of whom are parents of children at the school.

For more information about this or any of the initiatives running at The Outback please contact Sarah Waddington

Fancy making one of our meals for yourself? You can download a free recipe card here!