Their story, in their words…
We ran a cooking program/ cafe within our school where we sold culture food along with a cookbook that we designed and printed out ourselves. The cook book included easy recipes aimed at young adult people from various countries around the world. This was an attempt to encourage young people to become more connected as we believe a great way to do this is through food. This was at the beginning of our friendships so the entire experience really brought us together and allowed us all to get to know each other better.
The cooking programme was actually the idea of one of us, Aghogho. Then as a group we discussed how to make what was just an idea into motion. There were many ups and downs along the way but we managed to raise £428.68 for ActionAid, a charity that focuses on aiding less fortunate women around the world, along with the Mark Evison Foundation.
The journey to this was undeniably challenging as we had many group and individual commitments that we had to focus on such as mock exams along with keeping updated with our school work as we planned and prepared for the big day. To our surprise the kitchen took much longer to settle and we ended up waiting months to get a spot to cook the food in our school food tech kitchen. Along with this it took months to get a hold of printers as most were either too expensive or unavailable. On the other hand, the project had a lot of benefits for us as a group and also for our school. We all feel as though it brought us closer together as friends because not all of us had classes together plus it gave us all a sense of responsibility to something meaningful.
Now that the day has passed and we’re no longer planning tirelessly, we all oddly miss the stress and anticipation leading up to the cafe as we were all feeling that way. It was always a lingering feeling of regret as we were worried that we wouldn’t make a profit which is why we are so grateful and grateful for what we made. We will miss the late night giggling calls and after school meetings we had in preparation for the cafe but we are grateful that we were given the opportunity to do this. Thank you again from us all.
