Background

Food poverty in a well know problem and is not unique to the North of Edinburgh, but it is something that many in our community are struggling with. 30% of children nationally going to school without a breakfast, we can assume that number is higher for our community.

Is well documented that a healthy breakfast an provide us the best way to be ready for the day, improving mental well-being, general health and energy levels. This is especially true in young people. Something we witnessed first hand when we ran our Breakfast club from our old building.

Early in 2019 we started our first Saturday Breakfast Club in the library, providing cereal, breakfast bars, fruit teas and coffees for free for all users of the library, but our main target for this provision were children and families. Later that year, with the help of funding from Urban Union and Robertsons, we expanded it to cover the whole of the summer holidays and October break. 

Then a couple of things happened, Covid closed our doors, then the building was demolished to make way for our new building. All this meant that we were removed from the community for several years and unable to continue was had grown into a valued service that was attended by many the community, with 1500+ breakfast portions being served over the period of 2019.

Fast forward to now, we are in our new building and back in the heart of the community and ready to help build up our community.

 

Proposal

We would like to seek funding to reestablish our Breakfast Club, providing free healthy breakfast to anyone who needs it.

The club would run again every Saturday morning and Monday to Saturday throughout each of the school holidays over the funding period.

We will provide,

• A range of cereals, fruits and breakfast bars
• Teas, Coffees and fruit Juices
• Options for those with dietary requirements and allergies

Access would be completely open to all, and we will not require anyone to register or provide details.

Note: Funding for our previous club was not given to us directly, items needed were purchased on our behalf from ASDA on weekly basis and delivered to us directly. If this would be possible again it would help us greatly but would not be essential for us to run the group.

 

We would like to provide a hot meal every week for the families we kow are struggling the most with food insecurity, we often hear stories of parents who wait until their childrenhave eaten to see what they leave so they can have the left overs as there is not enough food to go round the whole family.

 

Having family tea time for 4 months would allow us to provide 10 families with a hot meal and spend som equality time with their children at meal times. This would assist with not only healthy eating but social interaction and increase family dynamics. We would use the food we have on our sharing shelf to show what meals can be made on a budget so that families can join our sharing shelf and acess the food at a fraction of the cost they would pay in the supermarket. We would provide families with a small recipe book and help with budgeting.