The JNR8 Youth & Community Centre is the weekly base for the Whalley Range Community Forum, Whalley Range Youth Opportunities Association (WRYOA) Whiz Youth Project, Celebrate, Age-friendly Whalley Range & Chorlton and Whalley Range Mental Health & Wellbeing.

The JNR8 centre is a fantastic community resource – and we run a wide range of activities during the week for all ages, including ESOL, fitness, confidence building and social and self-help groups for people to come together to reduce isolation/encourage participation and friendships.

Cookery has always been a big part of our community engagement at JNR8 (our under 12 group even featured on Ready Steady Cook!) and we have a long history of providing community meals and food projects including the Food 4 Us cookery toolkit, Heritage cookery projects and intergenerational recipe sharing.

We are currently fundraising to improve our kitchen – as many of our cookery and nutrition classes have had to be put on hold as the kitchen is not fit for purpose.

Our exciting plan is to access funding to turn our current inadequate facilities into a professional kitchen so we can resume all the regular classes – and provide so much more!

We run a work club under the banner Generating Opportunities: a professional kitchen will enable us to provide catering, cooking and nutrition classes to improve skills and employability and projects that use cookery to improve English

In addition we want to resume our shared community meals – such as the successful Come 4 Tea, Festive Feasts and share recipes from around the world.

The Building is lovely – fantastic multi-use hall, storage for our projects, a chill out room, an IT room for computer beginners and improvers, a classroom for learning, teaching, presenting, planning and meeting.

Now look at our existing kitchen…

And look at some of the fantastic projects that go on here:

Imagine what we will all be able to do when we…

Generate our Kitchen!