Cooking Project Leader

As a volunteer Cooking Project Leader you’ll induct volunteers into the kitchen, facilitate the team, create recipe ideas, and lead on the preparation and cooking of the meal. You’ll be helping the environment by using food that would have gone to waste, and you’ll help to build an empowered community through the sharing of delicious food and conversation.

Every Friday 15:45 until 19:30pm

Responsibilities include:

• Running cooking sessions, leading a team of volunteers to create a three-course meal in a limited timeframe.

• Encouraging the whole team to have input into planning a tasty, healthy, and nutritionally balanced menu using surplus food ingredients.

• Inducting new volunteers into the kitchen.

• Working with your Project Leader team to ensure that all elements of the Project run smoothly, including maintaining a tidy and well stocked store cupboard.

• Ensuring that all volunteers follow the food safety procedures set out in our kitchen handbook.

• Completing the weekly checklist in the kitchen handbook, and the weekly session report via our website.

You don’t need to have any previous cooking experience – you just need to love food and motivating people!

About FoodCycle:

We are FoodCycle, and our vision is to make food poverty, loneliness and food waste a thing of the past for every community.

We connect communities, reducing loneliness and food poverty by creating welcoming spaces for people from all walks of life to meet, eat and have great conversations.

Skills you'll learn:

✓ Teamwork: you’ll work as part of a team to prepare a delicious meal and serve it to our guests.

✓ Leadership and delegation: we'll train you up to lead cooking sessions and induct new volunteers.

✓ Cooking: you’ll learn how to cater for large numbers of guests and how to make nutritionally balanced meals.

✓ Problem solving: you won’t always know your ingredients ahead of time, so you will need to get creative to produce delicious three-course meals.

✓ Rapport building: you'll be building meaningful connections with your volunteers, ensuring they come back regularly.

What to expect from FoodCycle:

✓ Expenses covered in line with our volunteer policy.

✓ Accredited Level 2 Food Safety qualification provided by FoodCycle.

✓ A other training opportunities provided throughout the year, including safeguarding and nutrition training.

✓ Support and guidance from the local FoodCycle staff team.

✓ An annual volunteer conference to help share knowledge and experience with other volunteers on a national level.

✓ The opportunity to take on additional tasks/responsibilities within your Project Leader team.

✓ Impressive skills to add to your CV and a reference if/when you need it.

✓ The opportunity to meet a community of like-minded people.

✓ A fun, creative volunteer experience with impactful influence over a community-led Project.

What’s expected from me:

We hope that Project Leaders stay with us for a minimum of 6 months, to enable them to get the most out of the role. As Cooking Project Leader, you will be expected to:

✓ Attend Project Leader meetings to discuss as a team how things are going.

✓ Lead a minimum of one session per month.

✓ Follow all FoodCycle policies and procedures, including reporting any accidents and incidents.

✓ Complete Level 2 Food Safety, Food Allergens, and safeguarding training.

✓ Complete an enhanced DBS check (required for all roles involving ‘regulated activity’).

✓ Recognise, respond to, and report any safeguarding issues or concerns.

✓ Complete the session Project report on our website after leading a session.