Cook Up Co-Manager and Stirring the Pot Lead (Maternity Cover)

Primarily, to lead on the development of Stirring the Pot, a social change initiative that has grown out of Cook Up, with a twofold objective:

• Promoting the idea of dignified kitchens as a human rights issue, thus influencing policy.
• Sharing our practical experiences of Cook Up to inspire and support others in community settings to offer local variations of the model, thus influencing practice.

Additionally, to work alongside the other co-manager to support the delivery of Cook Up. Cook Up offers a choice-based cooking opportunity for people without access to a kitchen, specifically people seeking asylum, experiencing homelessness or living in temporary accommodation.

1. To implement and deliver the next stage of the Stirring the Pot initiative, including creating ways to measure success and impact achieved.
2. To launch the Stirring the Pot toolkit and build a dissemination strategy.
3. To build relationships with campaigners and experts working in the food justice space, where our evidence and knowledge can be helpful.
4. To keep up to date with relevant research, policy and practice in food justice, including how food provision in temporary accommodation is managed and what the levers for change are, such as when national or local government strategy changes or new procurement opportunities arise.
5. To take up opportunities to influence policy on food provision/cooking facilities in temporary accommodation, such as responding to consultations or inquiries or providing evidence to all party parliamentary groups.
6. To build relationships with Cook Up participants who have lived experience of these issues, and support them to share their views
7. To speak out, alongside our partner Just Fair, about the human rights elements of food choice and agency.
8. To be a strong advocate for Cook Up and the dignified kitchen model, promoting to other practitioners running cooking initiatives within the community, and to nurture these relationships, offering support to embed the principles of a dignified kitchen in their work.
9. To manage a small budget for this work.
10. To identify and reflect on the wider issues affecting participants’ lives, sharing learning within the team and using these insights to shape Stirring the Pot’s messages and future work.

1. To support the other Cook Up co-manager in the oversight and delivery of all aspects of running the service, taking the lead from them but able to step in when they are absent or on annual leave.
2. To support the logistics of running Cook Up, including onboarding and ensuring the kitchens are a warm and welcoming space at the start of each session.
3. To work collaboratively with volunteers, other QSA staff members and visitors who are part of any particular session, and to provide them with guidance before and during sessions.
4. When attending the sessions, to support participants to cook the dish of their choice within the allocated time.
5. To work with participants to identify and resolve any difficulties in attending or making the most of the sessions, and to develop the service collaboratively with them.
6. To facilitate a sense of community and encourage conversation and connection between cooks during the sessions.
7. To ensure that health and safety policies are always adhered to.
8. To follow the service’s recording systems, ensuring that we monitor and record impact accurately and in line with GDPR requirements.
9. To signpost cooks to other organisations for support with wider issues that fall beyond the remit of Cook Up.

1. To work within, and actively promote, the policies and procedures of QSA.
2. To receive line management, supervision, and appraisal from the Head of Services.
3. To undertake any other duties appropriate to the role, as agreed by the QSA Director.

Essential

1. Experience of working in a community setting, supporting people at a difficult time in their lives, working ethically and in a trauma-informed way.
2. Experience of working collaboratively and sharing good practice with other organisations.
3. Experience in one or more of the following: campaigning, policy work, human rights, systems change or running networks or communities of practice.

Desirable

1. Experience of co-design and co-production of initiatives.
2. Lived or learned experience of homelessness, temporary accommodation or seeking asylum.

Ability

1. Ability to plan new initiatives, working both independently and collaboratively in a small team.
2. Confidence presenting to, and building relationships with, external audiences, across a range of stakeholders from fellow practitioners to senior officials.
3. Strong commitment to, and knowledge of, assessing impact.

1. Ability to manage own workload and to work flexibly.
2. Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including a solid working knowledge of Microsoft Office tools.
3. Ability to engage with people who have experienced bereavement, with empathy and tact.
4. Strong commitment to, and knowledge of, assessing impact.
5. Ability to promote and publicise Down to Earth enthusiastically and effectively to individuals and groups.

Essential

1. Hold a Level 2 food hygiene certificate or be willing to study for one.
2. Hold a First Aid at Work qualification or be willing to study for one.

Other

1. Respect for lived experience.
2. Commitment to and understanding of equity, diversity and inclusion, in the workplace and in service provision.
3. A willingness to work within a Quaker ethos is essential, as set out in QSA’s mission statement, which is:
   “To enable people on low incomes in London and beyond to seek solutions to the issues affecting their lives. To do this, we will listen to and respond to the needs of the community by running practical, sustainable and collaborative projects. We will share our work with others when it is clear it has the potential to bring benefits to communities outside of our own.”

Quaker Social Action’s mission is twofold. We enable people on low incomes to seek solutions to the issues affecting their lives. We listen and respond to the needs of communities and run practical, sustainable and collaborative projects.

Secondly, we share our learning where we see the potential to bring benefit to communities outside of our own – by running professional training, and by speaking truth to power to seek structural change.

Our services include crisis support for those unable to afford funerals; practical support for people experiencing homelessness, such as a mobile library and a community kitchen space; and free mindfulness and wellbeing programmes.

Learn more about our practical action against poverty >

QSA has a rich 150-year history with roots in the Quaker movement. Our work is still guided by Quaker values like Truth and Justice, and we value our place within the Quaker community. At the same time, there is nothing religious about our work: our services, jobs and volunteering roles are open to all.

For the last five years, QSA has been hosting pop-up kitchen spaces where people without kitchens of their own can choose the meals they wish to cook and have the agency to cook them. We currently use two community kitchen spaces: one in Islington and one in Tower Hamlets. People come to Cook Up when they are experiencing homelessness or living in temporary accommodation, including Home Office-managed accommodation for people seeking asylum. In these situations, people may not be able to access food that is nutritious, meets their dietary requirements and/or is culturally appropriate.

A recent evaluation by the Tower Hamlets psychology team showed the enormous impact of Cook Up on nutrition, self-confidence and social connection. Over this time, Cook Up has hosted 300 sessions, at which 1,695 participants have been able to cook nearly 13,000 portions of food.

QSA’s mission includes a desire to share our learning where it benefits communities beyond our own. Our Cook Up participants repeatedly tell us about the detrimental impact of meals with no choice, no variety and no opportunity to cook for themselves. Over the last few years, we have researched the context for, and impact of, having food provided in this way, by learning from our Cook Up participants and commissioning an independent evaluation of the service. We want to contribute to a better future for other people without access to their own kitchens, and we want to do this in two ways.

The longer-term vision is to do so by influencing upwards. With the credibility of our experience and working in close collaboration with our Cook Up participants, we want to make the case that the lack of dignity and agency over food should be addressed, and that it is in fact a contravention of everyday human rights. To this end, for the past year we have been working in partnership with Just Fair, an organisation specialising in precisely this field, to hone our messages.

We know that big policy shifts are not easy, so we also want to influence things on the ground. Other charities and voluntary groups already do so much to meet basic needs, including food provision. We want to share practical tips, tools and encouragement to help them scope out if, when and how they can incorporate some principles of a “dignified kitchen” into what they do. Few would be able to replicate Cook Up, but many might be able to adopt some of its principles and attributes.

We have called this initiative Stirring the Pot to evoke a cooking metaphor and to signal our desire to agitate the status quo. We hope that by stirring this particular pot, we can improve the short, medium and long-term prospects of people without a kitchen to call their own. After several years of groundwork, Stirring the Pot is ready for the next stage: going public. For the first time, we are creating a dedicated role to lead this work over the course of 2027.

The various teams at QSA undertake very different tasks, but there is a strong sense of collaboration and of celebrating other teams’ successes with gusto and goodwill. Our staff are enthusiastic about and engaged with what they do, and there is an openness and a solid commitment to social justice visible across the organisation.