Cook, Chai and Chat – The Journey So Far….

Pendle Women’s Forum are one of our winners from Round 1 of the Creative English Innovation Fund. Here they tell us more about how their project is going. To find out more and see more photos visit Pendle’s Facebook page.

Here at Pendle Women’s Forum in the lovely Lancashire town of Nelson we are now just finishing the fifth week of our new project, Cook, Chai and Chat.

After successfully getting obtaining the funding (yaaaaay) we began our project in the middle of September.

The project is in two parts; one part being baking classes where women are simultaneously learning a new skill as well as improving their English by learning new vocabulary, watching cookery clips in English and going out to buy ingredients.

As simple as the task of buying ingredients sounds, for a person with little or no English this simple task in itself can feel like a huge hurdle!

By encouraging the learners to do this it increases their confidence and practice at spoken English.

The second part of our new project is then putting on “Afternoon Tea”.

The items baked in the classes are sold with hot/cold drinks at a small price to produce revenue.

As the weeks go by, the “Afternoon Tea” is being attended by more and more people, and we have new faces each week, which is lovely to see.

The women love coming in to a nice, safe comfortable environment to enjoy a hot drink and yummy deserts.

We’ve had fab feedback about our new tea room, which we are very proud of because turning the small room into a vintage tea room was not easy.