Cintre Celebrates Cooking Course Success

Cintre staff and service users got together on 2nd October to celebrate the first group completing their 12-week Big Lottery Funded Cooking Course.

 The course is designed to give small groups the opportunity to develop their cooking skills, and knowledge of nutrition in a safe, supported environment. It is also a great way for service users to make friends and develop new social connections. Before starting the course all participants are given the opportunity to attend a half day food hygiene training course, and each cooking session is then run by a combination of keyworkers and volunteers.

 For the celebration day, the course group prepared a fantastic, and healthy meal of fajitas, sweet potato wedges, and a range of salads. To mark their achievement, each participant was given a certificate, and a recipe book covering all dishes that they cooked across the 12 sessions.

 The cooking course is just one of several group activities that Cintre now provides for service users to help them develop new skills, find volunteering opportunities, socialise, and make new friends. Other activities on offer include IT skills sessions, sports, board games afternoons and a gardening club. The charity has big plans to expand its offering of group sessions in 2019 and beyond.

 Claire Mould, Cintre CEO said, “Cintre are delighted to be able to offer new and exciting group activities to our service users. We have been highly impressed with how much every member of the first cooking group has benefited from the course, each positively progressing onto something else as a result of their involvement in the course. This has proved so successful that we are now planning to expand our groups, and look forward next year to opening them out to service users from other organisations in the City.”

Service users from the course are pictured below with CEO Claire Mould and Activities organiser Scott Hopkinson (fyi, winner of the Activities Organiser Award at this years’ Care Awards)