Support Food Matters' work

We seek your support for our two main on-the-ground areas of work: 

Food and Criminal Justice  

Our ground-breaking work in the criminal justice system takes a whole-prison approach to food so prisoners can better access healthier meals. By supporting their mental and physical health, we help prisoners make the move towards a crime-free future. We aim to: 

• Make balanced, healthy food choices more accessible in prisons.
• Improve offenders’ knowledge, confidence, attitude and behaviour around healthy eating.
• Bring about prison-food related national policy change – read our ‘Food Matters in Prisons’ briefing to find out more.
  

We do this by improving the food environment within prisons, running courses, peer mentoring and other food-related health activities for offenders, training catering staff, and working with the Ministry of Justice and Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service.  

Community Food and Wellbeing Courses 

We deliver food and wellbeing courses to people facing multiple and complex challenges. Our work supports individuals from underserved and often overlooked communities, including prisoners and prison staff, young offenders, people affected by substance use, young mothers, care leavers, and others. 

Our courses include practical toolkits, healthy eating workshops, cooking courses and peer support training. They focus on: 

• Practical skills
• Knowledge of eating well for physical and mental health
• The positive impact of cooking and sharing food socially.

All courses use motivational techniques to gently guide participants towards change.  

‘The sessions are about more than the food, they’re a lot about independence. They fund food education in schools, so why shouldn’t they do it for people outside of schools, who live alone, who never really have the access to education or family support’