Young people attend EAP when they are often disaffected, distressed or distracted from their education. School placements have broken down and youngsters are feeling dejected and vulnerable. It is the aim of EAP to support them and help to guide them onto the right track giving them back the life chances that at times seemed lost to them.
We have supported Ealing Alternative Provision for several projects and activities over many years and we were delighted to provide them with a grant recently for cooking equipment for cooking lessons.
“Thank you for the money that the Willam Hobbayne Charity has donated to EAP to support our local young learners in their cooking lessons. It will make such a difference to our young learners who will be so excited to be using such good quality, new equipment in their lessons.
We have got used to "making do" with the same old battered equipment for the past ten years, and as budgets have become more and more squeezed, the priority was to be able to buy food alone. Hence, we have been unable to replace old, broken and unsuitable stuff. As a result of this, we have been using a "mish-mash" of equipment, often with not enough to go around for each student. This grant and the purchase of the equipment will make such a difference.
Learning to cook remains one of the most vital life lessons, and we aim to teach our young people how to enjoy cooking for themselves and their families. We believe that cooking, as a practical subject, should be one of life's pleasures, and we find that it can also be very therapeutic to many of our students who have had difficulty accessing mainstream academia, and who find practical subject areas that they can succeed in. We teach our students to cook simple, healthy, quick and tasty dishes; the sort of food that they would buy from a take-away, but a home-made healthy version.
We also cover related topics such as budgeting, food hygiene and safety, sustainability and the environment, to name but a few.
It will be such a pleasure for the students and myself to have this new, high quality equipment, I know that it will bring us all great pride and satisfaction.”
Helen Holbrook- Cooking teacher at EAP
We look forward to not only seeing the students in action with their new equipment but also tasting the fruits of their labour!
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