Tapestry Care UK limited
Registered Office: HOPWA House, Inskip Drive, Hornchurch, Essex, RM11 3UR
Registered Company No: 3942243
Registered Charity No: 1079969
Rebuilding Community Resilience Post Covid 19
Food Expansion plan
October 2022
Longer and stronger. Good nutrition can boost immunity, fight illness-causing toxins, keep weight in check, and reduce the risk of heart disease, stroke high blood pressure, type-2 diabetes, bone loss, and cancer. Along with physical activity, a balanced diet can also contribute to enhanced independence as you age.
Version 3.1 Jan 2023
Rebuilding Community Resilience Post Covid
The Tapestry Food Project (Overview)
The Tapestry food project is integral to Tapestry’s mission values and aims.
• Malnutrition is a growing problem within the UK, particularly for our older generation. Contributing factors to this are many and varied and can be social, environmental or economical as well as medical.
• Eating well is proven to reduce serious physical medical health issues such as heart disease, stroke, cancer and Parkinson’s disease.
• It is also suggested that a good diet is just as important for our mental health and that a number of conditions, including depression, may be influenced by dietary factors.
• Social contact during mealtimes is also valuable in reducing social isolation.
Access to good quality food is fundamental to living a healthy life. Therefore Tapestry is committed to ensuring, that as part of its service provision, all adults have access to healthy, appropriate, affordable food.
Historic commitment to food provision
Tapestry has a long history of providing quality food for its clients and customers having established a ‘meals on wheels’ service as long ago as 1961. Today Tapestry provides food to its clients at its HüBs and delivers hot nutritious meals to peoples homes to support vulnerable people who cannot or do not have the means to cook at home.
In 2015 Tapestry launched it’s food project.
The food project aimed to provide access to high quality fresh food, at reasonable prices, to all its clients in all Tapestry locations and in their own homes and eventually to the wider community at large.
This food will not only be fresh and of high quality but will also be tailored, where appropriate to the dietary needs of the individual and be a core part of the care plans that are put in place for any individual requiring a range of services from the organisation.
The impact of Covid 19
the single most influential factor on Tapestry’s activities and its clients during 2020-21 was the Covid-19 Pandemic and the lockdowns implemented to control its spread.
The lockdowns meant that our clients could no longer attend our Hubs to receive food, important care and support services and their carers could no longer have important respite, the impact of this was significant.
Very quickly, it became clear from our interactions with clients, that the vulnerable people we care for, and their Carers, were becoming increasingly isolated and anxious, and their ability and enthusiasm to cook healthy meals for themselves was waning fast.
As a result, we developed and immediately introduced daily deliveries of hot freshly prepared meals. We had experience of delivering large numbers of meals to single venues, but had not previously delivered to individual homes. We put a call out for volunteers and were able to secure enough to establish this service within a week.
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Demand for hot meals rose steadily throughout the pandemic and became a vital part of very vulnerable people’s daily routine. Not just for the food, but the social interaction with the volunteer or staff member delivering it.
Delivering the new food service demonstrated that there is not just a need for these vital services during the pandemic, but an ongoing need for many vulnerable people to be supported in this way.
It also became clear that there are many people hidden within our community who are isolated and/or lonely and, as a result, are experiencing high levels of anxiety and depression and are not eating healthily.
In response to this need, we made the decision to continue to provide a hot meals delivery service, as part of our ongoing service provision. This vital service improves individual health and wellbeing, community resilience, acts as an early warning system to social services and signposts vulnerable people towards services they may need, including our own.
During the pandemic we became aware of vulnerable people, of all ages, who needed our support. As a result, we extended the service to anyone who needed it.
Between March 2020 and April 2021, we delivered 15,930 meals and between 2021-22 provided 14,680 healthy affordable meals in our HüBs and delivered another 8,590 meals to individuals at home.
Why is this work necessary?
Older people and vulnerable adults with complex needs in our communities, have become viewed as liability and challenge, in short costly.
Access to care and support had become difficult to comprehend and what is offered more disengaged from people’s concerns that they have for themselves and their families.
The Covid 19 pandemic has highlighted the vulnerabilities of this forgotten part of our community and created a series of new challenges that need addressing. If we wish for our communities to be a place where all can thrive and live healthy fulfilled lives, we must work differently to meet these new challenges that will, if we do not address them, have a negative impact on the health and wellbeing of the whole community.
Covid 19 and the current cost of living crisis has also put an enormous strain on those who care for people in our community.
By providing this extended food service we will be able to reach many more people and
• Reduce instances of malnutrition in older people in the UK,
• Improve nutrition and reduce obesity
• Reduce Loneliness and social isolation
• Improve physical and mental health
What will we do
Our food delivery service was born out of need during the covid lockdowns and has proved so important we retained it.
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Need is growing and we are restricted geographically by our current delivery offer of just offering hot healthy meals at lunch time either in the HüBs or delivered
The aim of the project is to build on the existing food service to help more people. We intend to introduce a new meal offer to complement the hot offer so that more people can access food.
We will offer a quality, freshly made, healthy meal that can be reheated This will enable us to
• Extend the geographical area of our food delivery service by removing the time and hot meal restrictions. Preheatable meals can be delivered at anytime and in bulk
• Reduce the cost of meals by reducing delivery frequency.
• Extend the meal range
How we will do it
Creating meals that can be safely reheated is a complex process requiring
• Deliverable menus
• Detailed assembly instructions,
• Precise labelling
• Specialist packaging.
It is something that we have been working towards and are now ready to deliver as we have the experience and expertise within our food team. We will develop inhouse, supported by external consultants, menus and meal assembly processes. This will ensure that
• The food meals that are sent out to be reheated are of an equal high quality to the hot food deliveries
• Meals are assembled using identical ingredients and match the labelling and cooking instructions
• Labelling meets food safety requirements.
• Food heating instructions are clear and precise.
• Food is packaged correctly and effectively ensuring meals can be stored and reheated safely.
Volunteers
As with all Tapestry activities, the food project works with volunteers
In partnership with its volunteers, Tapestry will
• Through practical support educate all those that receive the food, and the wider community on how to improve their health and wellbeing through food.
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• Improve the skills of individuals to cook for themselves.
• Tackle loneliness and isolation by bringing people together
We will develop and launch a new volunteer recruitment campaign to target volunteers who are able to meet the time commitments of the new flexible food deliveries and work directly with staff to deliver food education activities.
Further Expansion
Going forward, we will assess the possibility of delivering meals to collection HüBs where individuals can collect meals for themselves or those they care for, such as local Churches or Libraries. This will enable us to reach an even larger demographic and keep meals affordable.
Outcomes of the project
1. The project will alleviate hunger by delivering nutritionally balanced affordable meals to individuals in the community who cannot because of disability, cannot because of inability and cannot because of lack of facilities, cook for themselves.
2. Provide food education through information delivered with the meals and events where recipients can learn about heathy eating and improve their cooking skills.
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Tapestry Care UK Limited
HOPWA House, Inskip Drive, Hornchuch Essex, RM11 3UR T 01708 796600 E hello@tapestry-uk.org www.tapestry-uk.org @TapestryCare
TapestryCare Registered Office: HOPWA House, Inskip Drive, Hornchurch, Essex, RM11 3UR Registered Company No: 3942243 Registered Charity No: 1079969
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Rebuilding Community Resilience Post Covid
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