Creating community through food and fellowship
The Harmony Hub
Our site at 145 High Street Redcar will close in the coming months aa the building is going up for sale.
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A supportive community committed to developing healthy fulfilling lives and helping each other along the way
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We also want to restart the support courses to help develop life skills like budgeting, cooking, healthy living and more. These will operate from Growing in Harmony once we have relocated our kitchen.
Greggs provide their excess food [last cooking of savouries and leftover sandwiches] each evening. The food is stored in our chillers then given out free to anybody that comes in. The lunch clubs will restart soon, but unfortunately we have found a water damage problem to the rear of the Harmony Hub and the kitchen. Necessary repair cannot be carried out until after the Easter break.
Over the years the Harmony Hub has been a lifeline to many, providing a safe space, a sense of community, and education around cookery and nutrition. We are delighted to announce that our lunch club, which has always been at the centre of our community, will soon be resuming. With the help of Hubbub we have set up a community fridge, rescuing supermarket surplus food that would otherwise have gone to waste and providing it for donations to those in need. Like us at In Harmony Food Revolution, Hubbub are all about creating positive environmental change
In addition we will be using some of the food, along with veg from the garden for our lunch club, using these donations to create nutritious meals together with our visitors. The lunch club is a really enjoyable experience for those who attend because we cook together, learning new skills, and we eat together, building lasting friendships.
During the Covid-19 crisis we were unable to run our regular cookery groups including lunch club and Thursday soup and social that so many members of our community depended on for company and support as well as healthy food and an opportunity to learn to cook. During the crisis we continued to support our community with our pay as you can shop, allowing people to get the food they needed while seeing a friendly face. We also did some work with Karl Buxton, Karl is an award winning chef who worked with us to offer cookery videos that we shared widely on our website, facebook pages and youtube channel. We also offered the videos, along with ingredients boxes, to people who previously attended our groups and wanted to keep up their learning around the essential life skills of cooking and nutrition.
About the Hub
The Harmony Hub is our centre on Redcar High Street. It's where we redistribute the surplus supermarket food we rescue that would otherwise have gone to landfill. It's also where we teach skills like cooking, share information about nutrition, deliver training and much more.
Thanks to an amazingly generous donation from Willmott Dixon in 2019 we were able to install an industrial kitchen where staff and volunteers can pass on their knowledge and skills to people who are just developing their interest in cooking. This knowledge allows people the option of eating healthily even on a low budget, it means that often people are able to feel empowered when they discover that making a healthy meal can be easier and cheaper than we sometimes expect and in some cases people even discover a new passion in life and go on to develop their catering skills and enhance their whole lives.
During the regulations around COVID19 we were unable to continue with our groups as normal. Our focus during that time was collecting surplus food from supermarkets to distribute from our pay as you feel shop, where people could take as much as they needed and were invited to leave a donation to the costs of the centre if they were able. Keeping the shop open allowed us to stay in contact with some of the more vulnerable people who come here and to make sure that there was still a steady supply of food to those in financial uncertainty, either due to the crisis or for other reasons.
Now that we're working with Hubbub our premises is home to a community fridge!
The Harmony Hub is above all a place where people can come together and be part of a group, it is somewhere where friendships are formed and emotional support is given and have been delighted to return it to this role since restrictions were lifted. Lots of the people who come here are having a difficult time in one way or another, struggling to make ends meet, dealing with housing challenges and battling loneliness.
Although our shop and many of our groups were developed with vulnerable people in mind, everyone is welcome at the Harmony Hub. Preventing food waste by using food that would have been thrown away is vital for the protection of our planet, which means it is in everybody's best interest. Similarly cooking simple and healthy food supports the planet as much as our own bodies.
