Faiths4Change has been successful in receiving funding from Merseyside Waste Disposal Authority and Veolia Environmental Services through their Community Resource Action Fund 2010/11 to establish an Eco- Parents Support Network in Merseyside and Halton.

The “Simply Living” project will engage parents/guardians on low incomes with babies and pre school children to promote waste and sustainable lifestyle awareness and promote positive behavioral change to include waste, energy & water efficiency and food growing and waste disposal habits.

We will very soon confirm five existing parent and toddler groups within the Districts of Merseyside and Halton to whom we will conduct two awareness raising workshops with each group, working with the group leaders, parents and guardians and children to identify current behaviour and encourage learning, sharing, working together and support for each other to make sustainable lifestyle changes, this will be followed by a promotional event.

If successful, we intend to expand the programme during the rest of 2011 and beyond.

For further information regarding the programme please contact Calvin Stockton (Project Manager – Merseyside). 

Janet, Community Food Worker, and Robert, Community Engagement Volunteer, have been working in partnership with Asylum Link Merseyside to deliver a two year Target Wellbeing project. Enabling Asylum Seekers and Refugees to share food stories, recipes and cooking skills and learn from members of communities across Merseyside, the Home & Away cooking enables people from different cultures and countries to share food, traditions and friendship.

A recent session in Burscough lead to the following comments from participant Kirsty Fletcher;

"I found the cooking class a really interesting, fun experience, using and tasting loads of new foods like plantain and Samosas, which I really enjoyed. I am going to take the lessons I learned about spices into my own home cooking. As well as learning about the food of other cultures I learned a lot about the people I was cooking with, they were very friendly and helpful towards me as I was nervous when I first arrived. All in all this was a great experience and it has given me even more passion for cooking and I would certainly do it again in the future.’