Photography by Paul Nixon.
Churchgoers are volunteering to help people cook discounted food given through an initiative to help tackle the cost of living crisis.
Triangle Church, Dickens Road, Ipswich, has a four-week course for people who are given a slow cooker and shown how to provide nutritional meals, budget wisely and save money.
The church is also a member of the Ipswich Top Up Shops scheme in which Anglican churches in the town offer discounted food.
Visitors spend £2 on a bag and fill it with food on Wednesdays from 9.30am to 10.30am at the Triangle Church.
The Church’s Vicar Lawrence Carey said: “After becoming aware of people struggling with how to cook the food they were buying from the Top Up Shop, we sought to address this by successfully obtaining funding enabling us to create a slow cooker scheme as part of our “Wellbeing Wednesday” project where people can seek advice and support for a wide range of issues. By giving people a slow cooker and then working in groups of six people over four weeks we have learnt how to best use a slow cooker, creating nutritional meals on a budget. And because slow cooking is very energy efficient people have been able to save on energy costs as well.”
The Bishop of Dunwich, the Rt Rev Dr Mike Harrison, visited the Wellbeing Wednesday project and he said: “Churches are gearing up to offer warm spaces - that is a warm welcome, warm community, warm food and warm temperatures at convenient times of day through the colder months. And other churches are offering pop-up shops, debt advice, school uniform exchanges and signposting to services to alleviate some of the increasing pressures from rising prices. These initiatives are vital as they offer practical, concrete steps to address some of the problems being faced by those most sharply affected by the recent downturn economically.” He added: ‘I would encourage other churches to learn from these examples and consider what practically they might do to provide support for already existing initiatives which churches are running, and which are clearly meeting a need.”