Our Projects
CHILDREN ACTIVITIES
BOLLYWOOD DANCE- According to local and national research, children in primary school are becoming obese due to a lack of exercise and unhealthy eating. Following our research, we discovered that although various organisations have been running different health programmes, nothing suits young children. In order to promote a healthy lifestyle, it is crucial to create activities that children find engaging and beneficial. This project has been continuing since 2017. Every year more than 60 Children participate in this programme.
BOOSTER SESSIONS
The project's main aim is to provide extra support for children struggling to cope with their formal education. Through the tuition, each child receives 3 hours of session per week in Maths, English, and Science. Qualified teachers run the sessions. Most of the children are from BAME backgrounds and from families who are struggling with poverty. The project, therefore, benefited some of the most financially disadvantaged families and children.
FUN AND LEARN
During the summer period, we run this program and aim to engage children and their family members in creative activities as a team and use their idle time to do something positive. Approximately 40 parents and more than 100 children directly benefit from this project.
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Elders in the Asian community use creative and unique ways of growing fruits and vegetables that they've carried around the world with them to the confined spaces of the council estates and high-rise buildings. Many of the families migrated in the 60s/70s commonly grown bottle gourd, often providing for more than three big batches of curry that would last over a week each. Furthermore, we've been struck by how much of a role horticulture has played in building the resilience of the community and improving mental health. We targets the Bengali diaspora with an inter-generational co-produced oral history project that aims to protect and empower a community at risk of losing this rich heritage of healthy and organic living. 25 Young people are trained to collect oral history and compile it in a book format.
FOOD FOR FUN AND FOOD FOR LEARN
Summer holiday project. Through this project, we engaged children of disadvantaged families in the North Westminster area- particularly the Church Street ward to substitute food for children who are at risk of hunger. Following the recipe, all the participants' families will cook a dish with their children at home and enjoy it together. The main benefit of our package is that families will not need any additional resources for them and for their children to complete these activities.
BIG WORLK LITTLE CHEF
This is another amazing programme we run with young children to increase their awareness of healthy food & cooking method. More than 20 children participate in this programme. A local community chef runs the programme with a very simple recipe. Children are compiling all those recipes to produce a book.
WOMEN'S ACTIVITIES
WOMEN BOXING
Following consultation with women, we initiated this boxing session. As a result, about 20 women attend and enjoy boxing and keeping themselves fit and healthy. The main aim and objective of the project is to engage women of diverse backgrounds in physical activities and create facilities for them to make them more active and fit.
MY RECIPE MY STORY
is a unique project that is aimed at engaging and creating a space for those who are not fluent English speakers to provide emotional well-being support. This is a self-care programme. In this project, women work together to create a safe space where they will be free to share and learn from one another to manage the challenges they face. More than 30 women participate in every session. This group of women provided their stories and recipes and published a recipe bookMY RECIPE MY STORY.
SHARE AND CARE (Mental Health programme)
A highly experienced trained chef (British Indian), Senior Dietician (British Bangladeshi) and Senior Clinical Psychologist (British Bangladeshi) work together to deliver this programme. We support long-term lifestyle changes for women who suffer from mental agony. This multidisciplinary approach addresses the practical, emotional and health barriers that this community faces. We run courses through an online platform (Zoom) and physical meetings.
ELDERLY ACTIVITIES
MEET AND GREET is a unique programme to support vulnerable older people of different backgrounds. This programme targets people over 50's who are isolated, suffering from depression, loneliness and many other health complications and are in hardship. Most of the participants are from low-income households with disability and mental health issues, and the cost of living seriously affected them.
Through this project, we run health improvement activities such as line dancing, chair exercise and cultural activities. The main element of this programme is decent and healthy hot meals. During current hardship, vulnerable aged people will sometimes enjoy themselves with their peer groups and will have a portion of decent food to keep them healthy.
FAMILY SUPPORT ACTIVITIES
SUMMER PACK
From our own informal research, we found that many families are not able to support their children according to their needs. Even during school holidays, those parents are not able to take their children for holidays or any joyful activities; therefore, many children of BME communities will be deprived & distressed. Following the needs of those children, we have initiated our Summer Programme so that some of the children at least have some fun and stress-free time with their family and peer groups, and at the same time, they can also learn something. Through this project, we have provided a range of activities such as Outings, Cooking, Filming, Family Picnic etc. Approximately 89 children and 50 parents and Guardians participated in the summer programme.
OLDER AND BOLDER
The project is a unique endeavour. Through this project, we engage the elderly in social activities to reduce their isolation, decrease mental agony, manage stress, and enjoy better quality time. A series of events and activities targeting the BME older people. This project is about putting the health of the community first.
HEALTHY LIFESTYLE PROJECT
his project is run with the support of BME Health Forum. This is a practical programme designed to work with the individual to change their habits and improve their lifestyle. We have been working with 20 people from different age groups.
RESEARCH ABOUT LONELINESS AND ISOLATION
We recently conducted a research project with the BME Heath forum about loneliness and isolation in BAME communities. We train the staff on emotional well-being counselling skills, including goal setting and problem-solving skills training delivered by IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) professionals and ensure a monthly supervision session by an IAPT therapist supports them.
MIND THE GAPS project engaged the people of the disadvantaged group to improve their knowledge and understanding of public health messages and be aware of the health provision, especially the benefit of the Covid-19 vaccine. Our outreach workers directly reached more than 60 families and more than 100 individuals. Approximately 70/80 people will attend a Health event. The online TV channel programme also attracts more than 1500 people.
BUILD A BRIDGE
A community-led project in Westminster to build a bridge between the community and local government, increase community resilience, and build a local network. The ethnic composition in Westminster is very diverse, and it is evident that people from ethnic minorities are disadvantaged or underrepresented. Their quality of life is much unequal to their counterparts. Due to language and cultural barriers, many misperceptions and misinterpretations exist in the BME community. Consequently, they have been missing many worthwhile and important things in the community. Through this project, our outreach workers work with those identified as hard-to-reach groups and provide Covid 19 Vaccine Awareness in Westminster.
OUR COVID-19 RESPONSE
Where funding has been limited and contact has been constrained, we've adapted our approaches, formed new policies and changed in line with government guidelines to meet the challenge. With the start of the lockdown, we cancelled our usual programmes and reviewed our strategy with an immediate response. We consulted our network of psychologists, educators, medical professionals and more to design a number of programmes to support mental and physical health across over 160 families.
FOOD PARCELS AND PPE - At the start of the lockdown, huge food shortages and a lack of access to PPE left young people and their families at great risk. In turn, we recruited a group of volunteers to put together and deliver parcels full of 17 different food materials, including rice, pasta, vegetables, cereal, milk and more, alongside a range of PPE, including gloves, hand sanitisers and masks. With the support of the Westminster Church Street Councillor Ward budget, we provided packs for 101 families.
WELL-BEING ACTIVITIES PACK
From skipping ropes to stationery, we distributed 171 packs to children in Westminster's BAME community, including 120 new beneficiaries, with a range of 17 different activities to engage with at home. The packs were full of well-resourced creative activities that saw our children cooking, painting, completing puzzles, storytelling and much more, and we had a range of packs catered to different age groups too. Supported by the London Community Fund (Wave 2), the National Emergency Trust and City Bridge Trust helped us develop a particularly keen interest in cooking among the children involved, taking them away from their screens and into new habits.
FUN AND LEARN
Funded by the City of Westminster Charitable Trust, Fun and Learn was a 12-week project that distributed recipes and ingredients to 41 families of 107 children across our community. With these recipes and a facilitator, this project supported families to engage with one another while driving forward skills development in the field of food engineering and supporting mental health and well-being for disadvantaged children during the lockdown. We also translated the recipes into Arabic, supporting the diverse needs of our community to help children become proactive members in these growing families
THE WELFARE KIT
With a focus on education and mental well-being, our welfare kits included a range of creative activities, including cooking, sports and arts and crafts. Funded by the London Community Fund, Award for All helped us to provide kits for 171 underprivileged children in Westminster, supporting families with helpful ideas that help the children to grow through the lockdown.
FOOD POVERTY AND FAMILY BUILDING
With funding from the City Bridge Trust, our fifth project in COVID-19 involved more ingredients and recipes but focused specifically on both food poverty and building relationships within families. We provided six different recipes with all their ingredients included. All the families needed to do was spend some meaningful time together, taking children away from electronic devices and giving them space to become proactive members of their families, working together to tackle food poverty. The project supported 54 families, including 89 parents and 141 children, reaching more than we'd initially planned for with weekly protected quality time to build up bonds in the family, appreciating one another for their respective strengths at a time of hardship and heightened stress.
