The developing Nourish and Flourish programme currently encompasses 3 key components:
Nutritional Therapy Clinic: Improving an understanding our nutritional needs is crucial for long term health. Kerry Lock (Phd), Nourish and Flourish Programme Manager and Nutritional Therapist, provides one to one nutritional therapy support – working in partnership with the Didcot Primary Care Network. Didcot patients are referred directly by GP’s, Diabetic nurses, and Social Prescribers to improve their health and wellbeing.
Nourish and Flourish School Programme: The programme focusses on providing preventative support for young people. Integrating nutrition within the primary curriculum (for year 5) including Maths, Biology, Geography and History. Providing teachers with the lesson plans, slide decks and activity resources. Students are given an opportunity to learn to cook with surplus food. The SOFEA whole system approach is used to support the school community. The initial pilot rolled out in Didcot with 180 students across 3 schools in 2022 – followed by a pilot expansion in 2023, encompassing 8 schools and 455 students. Our aspiration is ultimately to source funding to support a roll out of the school programme. Thanks to a partnership with Oxfordshire County Council (OCC) we are able to utilise the Nourish and Flourish School Programme resources and trial with OCC selected primary schools across Oxfordshire 2025-2026. We are also developing secondary school opportunities into 2026 as part of this partnership.
Nourish and Flourish Kitchen: SOFEA’s kitchen was built between the Summer and Autumn of 2023 offers a fantastic professional spec kitchen to provision education & enhanced employability opportunities for SOFEA students – instilling lifelong cooking skills. Weekly, in term time, our young people prepare a bistro for their peers and the SOFEA community comes together to enjoy a seated meal, along with volunteers and guests. The Nourish and Flourish kitchen also focusses on developing opportunities for the wider community to learn cooking skills and gain access to recipes, including our Nourish and Flourish Cooking sessions (accessed through a referral).
In October 2025, we launched our pop-up Nourish and Flourish Community restaurant – a ‘pay as your can’ model, designed to bring the community together to share healthy food and good company. We are trialling 4 events over the next 12-month period. See our social channels for a video from our first event and stay tuned for more information about the forthcoming dates.
The kitchen also supports our fundraising team by running corporate events including our 2025 Christmas with Impact evenings, whilst supporting with other activities including the Didcot Youth Festival.
Nourish and Flourish Kitchen resources: We aspire to develop a hub of resources including recipes from the Nourish and Flourish kitchen and our wider Nourish and Flourish activities and share here on our website.
Thanks to the funding from the South and Vale Food Action Plan as part of our ‘Community Cooking Coalition’ partnership work, we are able to share a Family Christmas Meal on a Budget resource. As part of this funding, more pop-up events and resources will be promoted during 2026 to help support people maximise their food provision, eat well on a budget, and reduce food waste.