Homotopia is the UK’s longest running LGBTQIA arts and cultural festival. Born in Liverpool in 2006, they are an arts & social justice organisation producing and programming art, interventions, and participation to inspire and unite communities.

Every Autumn they present a high-profile festival of local, national and international LGBTQIA arts & culture.

They work year-round supporting early-career artists from the North West, as part of their QueerCore artist development programme. Their youth project, Young Homotopia, provides opportunities for LGBTQIA teenagers and young adults to explore their identities through performance.

Homotopia worked with us on our third cookbook, Secret Dishes From Around the World 3. They commissioned the fantastic artist Christian Asare to create an oil painting for the project.

North Liverpool Foodbank is an organisation seeded by the Trussell Trust that provides invaluable services to the local community. They help individuals and families in crisis, through the provision of emergency food supplies. 

We worked with North Liverpool during our 2021 Reverse Advent Calendar Campaign.  The project encouraged people to donate a specific item to their local food bank  every day leading up to Christmas. We created a resource hub on our website with information about food banks across the country and promoted our free donation tracker to help people support their local food bank.

Maggie’s Meals is a small-scale local charity based in Knowsley working to combat food poverty in the city. The charity is a membership-based organisation operating out of the Maggie O’Neill Community Resource Centre on Liverpool Road that is specifically oriented towards supporting the Knowsley community. For a weekly fee of £5, members can collect parcels of food and household essentials valued at £25 at their retail price, including cereal, milk, bread, pasta, tuna, toothpaste and shower gel, saving hundreds of pounds every year. During the pandemic, Maggie’s Meals operated a Coronavirus Food Help program for elderly residents, supplying those in need with essential food supplies entirely free of charge. The organisation has also offered a shopping service for those unable to buy their own groceries, and collected and delivered pharmaceutical prescriptions free of charge throughout the pandemic.

We also admire the work of the Big Help Project on Boaler Street in central Liverpool. The Big Help Project has been working in the city for over a decade, engaging with a wide range of sectors from financial advice and employability to housing and general wellbeing. The Big Help ‘Next Steps’ program provides free employability coaching to those struggling to access work and vocational training, covering skills relating to job interviews, CV writing, research and networking. A successful job interview often relies on making a good first impression, and Big Help’s ‘Suited’ program ensures that interviewees get the financial support they need to afford professional clothing and travel expenses. The Big Help Homes program is dedicated to making housing more affordable, and currently owns and subsidises more than three thousand properties across the region. The organisation also offers a professional mental health service dedicated to improving their community’s mental wellbeing.

Our Community Cookery School team visited Liverpool as part of the Secret Dishes From Around the World book tour in 2021. We spoke to Char Binns, festival director of Homotopia, the organisation we worked with to commission the artwork for the Ghanaian section of the cookbook. You can listen to the interview on our Share Your Secrets podcast, which is available for free via Spotify, Google and Apple!

Our Community Cookery School teams host a wide range of fundraising and community events throughout the year. These include our popular Secret Supper Clubs, Secret Dishes From Around the World cookery workshops and seasonal Community Kitchen get-togethers. There’s something for everyone! Find out more about all of our upcoming public events on our Eventbrite page…