We are providers of evidence-based nutrition and cooking class sessions and activities. Our classes support the implementation of Public Health England’s new Eat Well Guide. We provide a mixture of free, low-cost, private and corporate classes. We are a proud vegan community benefit society operating within an intersectional framework.
Founded in the summer of 2016 at first we operated nomadically. From June 2016 to June 2018 we taught 353 people hands-on nutrition and cooking classes using simple, accessible and affordable ingredients; cooking from beans & pulses, grains, vegetables and fruit. Showing our participants how to keep oils to a minimum but mostly how to not need to reach for that bottle of added fats in the first place by learning old skool cooking techniques and teaching them about the Glycaemic Index; why and how to favour unprocessed low-GI sources and how what we choose to eat affects both our physical and mental wellbeing. Also known as Low-fat and Vegan.
We certified to deliver the Food for Life programme from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (who are based in Washington, D.C.). Their evidence-based programme is designed by doctors, nurses and registered dieticians. Series on offer include the Cancer Project, Diabetes Initiative, Kickstart Your Health, Nutrition Essentials, Healthy Basics, Kids Health and an Employee Wellbeing programme.
Our classes have been featured in both the Metro and the Stylist magazine. We’ve had the pleasure of being asked to teach facilities and medical staff at the Royal Free Hospital a three part series which they reviewed here. And we are official suppliers of healthy cooking activities to Imperial NHS Trust.
Our motto is simple: Health is a RIGHT and not a privilege.
And it is from this simple belief that we operate.
In the summer of 2016 - We ran a 10 week series for Londoners and beyond teaching 40 people per week, every week how to make breakfast, lunch and dinner in a 2.5 hr session including nutritional lectures. Our classes proved so popular we had to turn away an extra 15-45 people per class. This was heart breaking for us but provided the proof that we were on the right track and boosted our determination to take this to the next level. Then thanks to support from organisations such as Olmec we were selected to partake in ‘First steps in Social Enterprise for BME women’, a fully funded training over 10 weeks in the Summer of 2017. We learnt about financial sustainability, legal structures and pricing. Next we were selected to go on the Start-up programme for one year in Autumn of 2017 with the School for Social Enterpreneurs which provided us with a peak into the corporate and grant giving world with access to witness testimonials and mentors. As a social enterprise we strongly believe that we have to be allowed to trade and to access funding in order to be sustainable. They also provided us with a much needed start up grant of £3,000 which we were able to use to incorporate as a Community Benefit Society in July 2018 and pay for annual insurance and indemnity and running costs and further equipment. In the first half of 2018 we were also blessed to be joined by our first intern Anais Le Moing as part of her degree. A passionate young person who over the six months with us used her previous experience in government to help us to set up all the necessary policies and analysed all our data from inception from June 2016 - June 2018 to measure our social impact and trends and what we are doing well and what we could do better. Below you can see some of our findings, email us if you would like to see the full powerpoint.
For the project to be sustainable and have maximum outreach we pivoted our focus from being nomadic to finding a location to create a cooking hub from where we could provide continuity for our users and nomalise the act of cooking healthily. Easier said than done with how expensive London has become for small businesses let alone a social enterprise that also aims to become a London living wage employer. We found nothing that we could afford on the private market or council properties to let. We thought that we might have to leave London to make this happen. However, undeterred, we contacted Camden Council requesting a meeting with the Economic Development Team being a Camden-based project and having largely taught in the borough. We showed them our findings and how successful we have been in engaging residents in the borough and wider. Seeing our potential and our social purpose they arranged meetings for us with partners in the borough who might be interested/looking for organisations to join their existing locations. This lead us to Somers Town Community Association who have offered to shelter us and the use of their main hall in what is becoming a mixed used space. With our own dedicated equipments room we will PILOT a mix of classes and associated activities ranging from how foods fight diabetes and cancer, unhealthy weight loss, how to maximize the little time we have in the kitchen, menu planning, corporate well-being classes, a weekly free food waste cooking club social preparing food from fresh vegetables and fruit donated as food waste and we will set about designing classes to be taught to medical and allied health professionals including carers who often only have time to prepare sandwiches for their clients. We will also be designing a social prescribing pilot. And we are grateful to have been awarded an extra 64 hours of fully funded 121 specialist consultancy support to help us achieve this with Olmec from August 2018 to March 2019 as part of their Ready to Grow programme.
Address: Somers Town Community Association, 150 Ossulston Street, NW1 1EE.
Days: Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays.
Closest station/s: Kings Cross, St Pancras and Euston station.
Find our more:
www.lifeafterhummus.com and follow us @lifeafterhummus on social media.
Contact us on info@lifeafterhummus.com and 079 0676 0576 to discuss your needs.
“We are Lifeafterhummus and the objects of our Community Benefit Society shall be to carry on any business for the benefit of the community by pioneering nutrition and lifestyle intervention solutions for a changing health and care landscape to improve the physical and mental health of the public and reduce health inequalities, tackle food poverty and reduce social isolation whilst operating within an intersectional framework.” Farrah Rainfly, Founding director and Food for Life instructor
Our team members:
Farrah Rainfly - Founding Director and Food for Life instructor
Dr Sanjana Jio - Founding Director and by day a Public Health doctor
Hetal Jani - Founding Director and by day a Finance, Operations & Communications Officer
Sophia Verma - Volunteer Social Media Officer
Anais Le Moing - Intern (2018)
Ceres Bizarro - Sessional staff member and Operations Volunteer and by day Vegan chef extraordinaire
Mentors:
School for Social Enterpreneurs mentor: Nicola Steuer, Managing Director of SSE
Corporate mentor: Tom Spencer, Director, Lending Products Transformation at Lloyds Bank
Affiliations:
Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
Plant-Based Health Professionals UK
