Make Lunch

Make Lunch, in normal years, runs holiday clubs for primary school aged children and their families, providing enrichment activities and hot, nutritious meals in two locations of the city in each week of the school holidays.

In 2020 these activities were significantly curtailed by Covid-19, and in fact we were only able to run one face-toface session in February.

Early in lockdown, we started to offer support directly to a number of our Make Lunch families who had indicated they were struggling financially, with that impacting on their ability to provide enough food for their families. When the scale of the pandemic, and it’s likely impact and timeframe, became clear, we consulted with our families to work out the best way for us to support them. From that, we started to deliver weekly food parcels of store cupboard food, chilled food and fruit and vegetables. We continued this from April through until the end of August, and expanded the range of people we were supporting as other organisations approached us to help their clients who were struggling.

Of the 50 families who registered for food parcels, 70% said they were struggling to afford food because of the pandemic, with a further 22% saying they had found this very difficult even before the pandemic.

In both October half term and the Christmas holidays we were still unable to meet in person, and so arranged to deliver food and activity packs to our families again.

October half term news headlines were dominated by the campaign on extending Free School Meals into school holidays, headed up by the footballer Marcus Rashford.

We were visited by Dine Romero, the leader of our local council, and Kevin Guy, Cabinet Member for Children’s Services, to help them understand the scale of the issue, and hear how we have been tackling this issue over the last 4 years. We had decided to increase the number of families we were supporting this Christmas by 50%, and ran a successful fundraising campaign to support this.

We then received an additional grant in December specifically to expand our Make Lunch provision over this winter, and were able to support 84 families in total.

Our local MP Wera Hobhouse visited to see for herself how our share of the money raised through her October Holiday Hunger campaign with local charity 3SG was being spent.

Our Beneficiaries Our Food

Our existing Make Lunch families, who would previously have attended our clubs, originally came to us through a combination of close links with several local schools, other children’s professionals in the area, and word of mouth.

Through the food parcel delivery project we had some additional referrals through housing associations, PCSOs, other charities and local schools.

Our Make Lunch members live primarily in the south-west of the city, often in Twerton, Foxhill, Whiteway and Southdown, with a few in Odd Down and Oldfield Park. On the other side of the city, we have clusters of families living in Snow Hill and also around Julian Road.

Wanted to thank you so much for the food and presents from Oasis. Really really helped. Thanks so much. I pretended the Elves left the Activity Bag on the doorstep for them on Christmas Eve.. BIG Excitement!! Thanks so much to all you very kind people. The majority of the food our families have received this year has come through Fareshare Southwest. Significant quantities of the fruit and vegetables we delivered between April and August was funded by the Salvation Army, and provided by Bath Wholesale Fruiterers.

Many families cited the fruit in particular as a highlight of their deliveries, and we had many anecdotal reports through our volunteers of children desperate to see what fruit was in their delivery that day!

This Christmas, we were very fortunate to be offered some Christmas food, and other staples, from Bath Foodbank to send out with our Christmas deliveries. We are very grateful for their generosity.

Thank you so so much. I can’t express how grateful I am… The kids will come back to all that lovely stuff to do this afternoon. Of course the food is wonderful too. I didn’t expect that at all.

Our Activities

When we were able to run our clubs face-to-face we would provide a series of enrichment activities, focussed on improving health & wellbeing, increasing skills, providing opportunities for families to engage with each other, and to provide experiences children might not have otherwise.

We do this through sporting activities, street dance lessons, cookery sessions and a great array of craft activities for parents and children to participate in together. We’ve had to find different ways to do that this year. Read on to hear about what we’ve done!

To support families confidence in cooking we’ve delivered Jack Monroe’s “Tin Can Cook”book and provided links to cook-along videos from the Virgin Cook It team. We also gave the families a recipe booklet created by some of our volunteers called “Let’s Cook Together”, which showed very simple recipes and ways to adapt them to make more dishes. To go along with that, we provided some of the basic equipment and store cupboard foods needed to cook these recipes. We shared our recipe booklet with other local organisations, and were very encouraged with the amount of positive feedback, and indeed the number of other organisations who wanted to share it with their members and clients.

We’ve provided outdoor play equipment and games such as frisbees to encourage families to be active, and to engage in playing together. We delivered printed copies of the free e-book “How to stay calm in a global pandemic” by Dr Emma Hepburn, along with mindfulness activity packs.

We’ve also created highly popular craft kits, covering a wide variety of ages, and have had some brilliant feedback.