Grant support for Winchester's Munch CIC
We popped along to Unit 12 in Winnall to meet district resident Mary Needham, who started her local community interest company (CIC) Munch in the building’s café space during lockdown. A registered public health nutritionist who has a wealth of experience running community cooking sessions, she now works with her chef husband Denzil on a wide range of catering projects.
Our Grants team has been able to support Munch during its journey, including its free healthy eating workshops for disadvantaged families.
Mary said: “It’s a lot of physical work as well as all the planning but it is so rewarding. We have some great outcomes and I particularly love working with families and children. Some people have been coming to the classes for a year or so and you can really see the changes. Everybody wants their kids to be healthy; it’s just trying to be able to find ways to do that on a low budget.
“We look at crossover ingredients so people don’t have to buy lots of different things and focus on low budget and simplicity. We also do a lot of education around sustainable nutrition and seasonality, health, provenance, food labelling and more.
“All of the classes are free and they’re aimed at people on low incomes and those who may be isolated and need to meet people. The social side of what we do is so important to us and there’s a lot of building communities with the wider community as well as within our workshops.”
A Winchester City Council project grant was able to assist with the production of Munch’s very own cookbook, Munch Lunch and Dinner. Some copies will be donated to community groups.
Mary said: “The cookbook will form part of an essential toolkit which hopefully this year will be developed so that other community groups can do what we’re doing without having to use us, so that we can reach a lot more people – we already have eight families on the waiting list for our Grub Club. We’re keen to start another one here in Winnall and we’re conscious that there are other areas of the city which could benefit.
“The cookbook has been designed with accessibility in mind; there are large sections of society who are alienated from things like cooking for lots of reasons. It’s larger print and focuses on one-pan meals which break down any barriers towards cooking – we don’t use scales or measuring jugs and we explain what any terms (like “ribbons”) mean. There are lots of photographs too. We work quite a lot with adults with learning disabilities and that helped us with the development of the recipes."
Find out more about Munch and its work.
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