Viewpoint is delighted to be developing an exciting partnership with Edinburgh Community Food, with a focus on maintaining good nutrition in older years. Edinburgh Community Food are a city-wide charity and social enterprise that works with vulnerable communities to address health inequalities. Their mission is ‘to get people into healthy food, and healthy food into people’.
The charity has received a grant from Eat Well, Age Well, as part of their Small Ideas, Big Impact fund, which focuses on older people living well via food. Edinburgh Community Food will be working with the tenants at Gillespie Crescent to deliver ‘Food Friends’. This will be a food and health programme for people to eat healthily and make new friends and will be based in the communal area at the Gillespie Crescent complex. Key aims of the project are to enable tenants to learn about a healthy balanced diet and nutrition in older years, reduce social isolation and to raise the awareness and increase knowledge of malnutrition in older adults. Those who are malnourished are more likely to have a greater number of health issues and may require hospital admission. However, risk factors for malnutrition include social isolation and loneliness which can be reduced through this project and in turn can help reduce and prevent malnutrition. The project will provide an opportunity for tenants to prepare healthy balanced meals from scratch and share meals in a social setting.
The cooking groups are to take place each week and there will be a different nutritional activity incorporated into each session. These sessions will be fun and engaging and those attending will also get to take home extra portions of food that they have prepared during the sessions. In addition, the REHIS Eating Well for Older People training course will also be offered to carers and staff to increase their understanding of how to help older people eat well in later years. Through the project, it is also possible to develop community shopping opportunities for tenants through either a community food shop or via a delivery service to the complex.