Community Centre Come Dine With Me

Project Idea: “Community Centre Come Dine With Me”

St Leonard’s in Bootle along with 3 local Community Centres came up with the innovative idea of a “Community Centre Come Dine With Me”. It boosted intergenerational links, connected the church congregation and its youth club, strengthened relations between the different centres and raised the profile with local council.

The original idea came when the local Registered Social Landlord called Evolve brought the local community together for an evening, split people into groups and invited them to make pitches for project ideas to a panel. Over the course of the evening, the idea of the Come Dine with Me project was born.

St Leonards suggested they could approach Church Urban Fund for match funding from the Mustard Seed fund. This helped build St Leonard’s credibility with the other groups and was able to share the equipment with the other centres. This helped improve relations and increase sense of co-operation.

St Leonard’s and the 3 other centres then set the rules - e.g. each group could only spend up to a certain budget, needed to be intergenerational, pulled names out of a hat to decide order etc. Then it followed the format of the Channel 4 “Come Dine with Me” programme. With a team of 10 people (5 young people, 5 older people) each Community Centre would cook a meal and the other teams would be invited along and then everybody would vote on which Centre hosted the best meal. Each of these meals had a theme and the centres and teams were dressed up accordingly (e.g. Country and Western, Footballers and WAGS, Hollywood). The evenings were a big success:

Rev Roger Driver “This was one of the most satisfying projects I’ve been involved in 20 years. Often in community work many things feel unfinished. With this, within quite a short period of time, there was lots of energy, excitement and input and you could see results at the end. If you pardon the pun, it left a good taste in everybody’s mouth”.

Impact:
Improved links between young and old:
The intergenerational element worked very well. The younger people loved it because they loved cooking and loved getting dressed up. It was a vehicle as the ladies that did the cooking were the ladies who normally did the community lunch and they would never have met those young people and worked with them. Previously, there had been tensions between the youth club and church congregation – it was viewed as “this part is the church, this part is the centre”. However through the project, they met one another and got on.

Improved relations between community centres:
Centres can sometimes view other as competitors and can be very territorial. St Leonards had quite a lot of equipment due to running community lunch but some of the other centres weren’t so well set up and so able to share/loan equipment. Relationships between the managers/community workers of the different centres deepened and helped engender a greater sense of co-operation rather than competition.

Great PR with local authority:
The local councillors were delighted with it. The events ticked all the boxes as far as they were concerned with regards to community cohesion. They invited all the groups to have a meal together at the Town Hall. Groups of young and old who previously had no interaction, were now sitting together laughing and enjoying each other’s company

Debbie King, Centre Manager: Its proof that if you give local people money, they know what to do with it, know how to spend it best and economically and get best value.