Scran! Kitchen Case Study
Lead Name: Carrie Gill
Address: The Warren, 47-49 Queens Dock Avenue Hull HU1 3DR
Website: www.thewarren.org
Open to the public: Young people only (16-25)
Opening Times: Get in contact first to check
About Scran! Kitchen
The Warren is a young people’s resource centre based in the centre of Hull. It has a strong philosophy of youth empowerment and democracy.It is also heavily influenced by the model of youth provision in the European tradition, with an age range of 16-25.
Scran! is a food project that was set up in 2021. It provides training and support around cooking, growing and eating better food. The organiser is Carrie Gill.
The purpose of this case study is to investigate how The Warren attempts to engage young people with the culture of good food.
Hull Veg Cities Community Campaign Officer Darren Squires visited the project on the afternoon of 21st March 2022. He observed a cooking session for young mothers and then carried out a 20 minute interview with Carrie. What follows is a condensed write up of that interview, downloadable as a pdf here.
You can also listen to the 20 minute interview on YouTube here.
Why did you set up the Scran! Project?
During the first lockdown our food parcel requests sky rocketed from 30 per week to 30per day. For some it was not really a need for food but for company, to see people on their doorstep. Scran! was set up because we realised that young people had no idea what they were doing with food.
How did you know this?
Because they were telling us. They were ringing us up and telling us.
Was it a lack of knowledge and confidence or a lack of equipment?
Everything. We had a set of questions that included a final question – ‘Do you have a tin opener?’ And if they didn’t we bought them one. Lots of stuff from FareShare didn’t have a ring-pull at the time. Another question was ‘Do you have pans?’ and we would buy them pans. It was a lack of equipment, a lack of knowledge and huge lack of confidence.
Once you had provided them with equipment how did you know there was still a barrier?
You don’t, unless people are telling you, and that can be over the phone, on the doorstep. We got the sense that people didn’t know how to cook, what to do with raw meat.
How did you address that?
We built Scran!
Which is?
A kitchen. And then we applied for funding through HLC (Humberside Learning Consortium). They came in, watched a session and agreed to fund us, to fund my position.
What is your role?
My job title is Nutrition and Food Lead. I look after all of the food parcels, the relationships with the Hull Food Partnership and FareShare. We take young people that fit into HLC’s narrow criteria (Hull postcode, aged 16-29, not in education and employment and not in receipt of previous project funding). We take them through level 2 food hygiene, with the aim of them being able to go into employment.
What it has also turned into is a place where people talk. To the point where last January I did mental health training, because I was getting disclosures that I didn’t know how to deal with. It is because the kitchen becomes a place where they talk, and build up relationships and friendships; and disclosures happen. It becomes more than just a qualification.
You seem to have a strict set of criteria for who you can work with. Does that enable you to engage with all the participants you think you need to?
Not around that criteria. So last year we did a 1 week mens’ only course with a male chef, and they didn’t have to meet all of the HLC criteria. All of these lads were in education or work, but they wanted to learn how to cook. But because we had hit all our targets we had that little bit of freedom.
You seem to be teaching a much wider set of skills than the level 2 food hygiene certificate. How does this fit in with the limitations on, for example, learner hours?
The qualification is 8 hours learning, plus 1 hour exam. We are given at least 20 hours of teaching time per learner. So we are given time to do more; to do more cooking, to visit Rooted in Hull (a local agri-urban project); there are all sorts we can add into the course. Each learner also gets a financial budget, which we use for ingredients or any equipment they need at home.
Are there issues working with an education course, with its expectations of attendance and a specific timetable?
Yes. It’s keeping them in, addressing their anxiety (and we’ve seen a huge increase) which can make it difficult to even get them into the building. If I say to someone today “I’ll see you tomorrow” they’ll say “yeah, sure”. But I’m not planning anything until I see them coming through the door the next day.
When you’ve got people already in the building it is great, but you’ve still got to work at getting them to buy into it. As long as they know, for example, tomorrow we are going to do this, and these people will be doing too, they are OK with it.
Of course they also know that they are going to get a qualification at the end, which helps.
Scran! is a project within an existing organisation. Are there any advantages, for example in communicating with participants, or building up trust and relationships?
Yes. Anything we do in the building has to be run past, and agreed by, the young people. They already knew me, I’d started at The Warren just before lockdown. And I coordinated the food parcels, so I was speaking to the young people regularly on the phone.
It helped that they knew the room too, they helped in the design of the kitchen, the colour scheme, the equipment – everything. So they had a buy-in.
Scran! was built to address a specific set of needs related to lockdown. Have those needs changed since lockdown?
No, they haven’t. The needs are always the same. They needed to learn how to cook, they still need to learn how to cook. As the young people who come through the doors change, it’s still the same needs.
But we do budget a bit tighter, because of the cost of everything. We also look at better ways of cooking, so the gas and electricity isn’t on all the time.
Fray Bentos pies! We got sent loads of them during lockdown; they take 30 minutes to cook in the oven, and that’s a ton of power, for not a lot of nutritional content. So we need to be savvy about the way that we cook. We got the Energy Doctor in here the other week to do a presentation, which was reallyenlightening.
So, we look at the full picture, what people have in their food cupboards already, howmuch power dishes need. It all comes into consideration when we are doing our mealplanning.