B&Q Handforth

Seashell is a national learning disability charity. Seashell supports children and young adults with complex learning difficulties, disabilities and additional communication needs from across the UK. We provide education, care, and support for people aged from 2 to 25 years at our outstanding school and college, our residential homes, and through our supported living services, community facilities, and services that we offer beyond our Cheadle Hulme site. We offer a range of volunteering opportunities for corporate teams at our 30-acre site. These activities primarily involve outdoor maintenance and gardening tasks that help keep our campus looking great, such as weeding, trimming back, and tidying our extensive grounds, as well as assisting our residential houses in maintaining their gardens.

Our aims and values in this project are; Reducing the amount of food that goes to waste Around 15 million tonnes of food is wasted every year in the UK alone, and the vast majority of that food is perfectly edible. The lowest carbon, most sustainable thing we can do with food that is going to go to waste is put it in a belly, any belly, rather than a bin, any bin (landfill, anaerobic digestion, animal feed, or compost). For every tonne of food that we save from going to waste, we save around 4.2 tonnes of CO2e from being emitted, and around 10% of the UK’s carbon footprint comes from food that is produced but never eaten. Providing access to enough food and great food for all Open Kitchen MCR is, among many other things, a live experiment in alternative economic models. The project operated for 3 years on a pay-as-you-feel basis, inviting members of the public to decide how much they would pay for their meal in a huge range of settings. While this model had huge social and environmental positives, it proved financially unsustainable. Open Kitchen MCR’s catering social enterprise operates on a pay-it-forward basis. The project offers catering at set prices, with one rate for private and corporate customers, a lower rate for established not-for-profit groups, and free or heavily subsidised catering for grassroots groups who are supporting vulnerable adults. Dignity, choice and social inclusion - a positive community future Our pay-as-you-feel model (employed at our city centre restaurant, open from Sep 2017 - Aug 2018) offered an innovative, inclusive model that deliberately bucked the trend towards dedicated “food poverty project” models. There are a number of projects that target people in food poverty, and in our current economic climate they are essential. However, the fact remains that by targeting people in food poverty, we also further separate and isolate them. Open Kitchen MCR aims to develop an alternative model that can evolve along side these projects, and offer a more inclusive option to bring a wider range of people together. Unfortunately, we found it wasn’t possible to support pay-as-you-feel financially, for a range of reasons. Our current outside catering venture operates on a pay-it-forward model, and supports grassroots groups that offer dignity, choice and support to vulnerable adults. We hope to continue our experiment into alternative economic models, and trial a new socially inclusive cafe / restaurant space in 2020.

We are an Early Years department who want to provide a super outdoor space for our children to learn and grow in!