A Highland centre is cooking up a storm with food donated by foodbank charity, Cfine.
The Bradbury Centre, in Bonar Bridge, is a wellbeing hub that supports vulnerable adults by providing them with regular fitness classes, games and lunch clubs.
It opened nearly 24 years ago, first as a lunch club and assessed daycare, then as a place where adults with additional needs could go to have fun and make friends at the same time.
Four days per week, the Bradbury Centre’s bus collects groups from surrounding areas such as Tain and Dornoch, and takes them to the centre for a day of activities.
Manager Lorraine Askew said: “People come in in the morning and get their morning coffee and toast, then they do activities. It could be yoga, music and movement or craft, or they can just sit and read the paper.
“Then they get lunch and then they’ll have a quiz or a game of bingo or something after before they go home.”
The centre is so popular that they have a waiting list of people hoping to join.
‘They have all sorts at the lunch club’
The Press and Journal, Evening Express and Original 106 have teamed up for The Big Christmas Appeal, which aims to shine the light on food poverty.
We are highlighting the work of Cfine, a foodbank charity that works across the Highlands and Grampian, and the ways they support places like the Bradbury Centre.
Cfine helps the centre keep costs down by providing them with food, both to be used for the members’ lunches and for staff to hand out to those they think might be in need of it.
Mrs Askew explained that the donations enable their cook to be experimental and make things they might not have been able to without the help of Cfine.
She said: “They have all sorts at the lunch club. They have a two-course lunch then their tea and coffee, so they’ll either have soup and a main course or a main course and a pudding.
“They have everything – anything you can imagine. Whatever comes in from Cfine, we try and use it. For example, we had a lot of Nutella one time and Fererro Rocher so they were all delighted because they had these beautiful cheesecakes.
“It makes the cook look at things and she’ll think ‘oh I can do such and such’ that we could probably never have afforded to do before. It allows us to give them something a bit different.”
She said, if there is anything the cook doesn’t use, members are free to choose select items to take home, adding: “They go in and use it as a little shop and pick up what they want.”
Support through the pandemic
Cfine also played a huge part in how the centre ran during the pandemic.
Though members were unable to go to the centre as usual, the team were keen to keep supporting them in any way they could.
“During the pandemic, Cfine supplied us with food stock, they gave it to us then we put it out to members of the community that needed it,” Mrs Askew said.
“We were putting out free meals, around 200 meals every week, during the pandemic plus doing other things like doing shopping for people.
“We find that not a lot of people come to us asking for food, but we know who needs it so we tend to put it out to them. Some people don’t like coming and asking.”
The Bradbury Centre is still feeling the effects of Covid, having lost many of its members to the virus.
‘They tell us they just couldn’t live without the centre’
Pre-Covid there would have been around 30 people at the Bradbury Centre at a time. Currently, they have to rotate groups of 15.
Mrs Askew said: “A lot of them are missing four days a week, many of them would come every day but we’ve got to reduce it down to one, or sometimes two a week because of the way things are now.”
Though the centre isn’t yet back to running at full capacity, members are still excited to be back.
Not only do members get a good feed from the centre, they also get moving during exercise classes and chatting with friends.
“They tell us they just couldn’t live without the centre,” Mrs Askew added.
“It enables a lot of them to stay at home longer when they start getting into difficulties as we’re able to support them. It’s also just a friendship thing and socialising, it’s good for their mental health, we try and keep them fit with the exercising we do.”