Blending spices to create opportunity for a thriving community.
Victoria Park’s Spice Academy wants to bring a diverse community together by cooking, growing & telling stories we will share how spices are used in our different cultures. Creating spice blends will be fun, help build understanding and create opportunity for all.
What we are planning:
To run a weekly spice club that creates a place for children and their parents/carers to share, taste, experience, recount and learn about the heritage of spices and how they are used in different countries, cultures and families.
Each week there will be a chance to work together and make a spice blend form a different part of the world. It could be a curry paste from Gujarat, a North African spice mix like Dukkah, a Caribbean Jerk recipe or something sweet like makowiec, a poppy seed pastry from Poland.
Then there will be a cookery demonstration and tasting session so we can taste the spice blend we’ve made. Each week families will go home with a new spice blend and recipes they can make, coming together the following week to share how we got on.
We will also tell an inspiring spice story it could be about the historical importance and origins of spice, a local business success story based on spice, how using spice changed lives, impacted culture, tradition or industry.
We want people to share with each other how spices are used in their families, cultures and traditions. There is so much to learn from one another, tips and ideas about how to use spices, recipes, how to grow your own and what the same spice may mean or be used for in different cultures. The more we share and understand the better!
Spices have been traded for centuries so we will be working towards having our own market stall that sells spice blends and spice products, and showcases the uses of spice from our Victoria Park community. We plan on using our knowledge of spice to create real opportunities for children, parents and our community.
What we need the funding for:
We want your help! The whole idea is to involve lots of people, come once, come very week, share an idea, bring us a recipe, tell us your story about spice or help us grow something we’ve never heard of before!
To get started we need to buy a stock of seeds for growing and spices that we can use for our spice club to start making spice blends that we can share. We also need to buy a few bits of equipment; pestle & mortars for grinding up our herbs and spices, tools for growing spices in our new polytunnel, we need to buy some packaging, lables, wieghing scales – in fact all the things we need to get our Spice Academy grinding!
We also want to get the whole community involved so if you can’t pledge anything right now please share what we are doing with your friends, family and neighbours!
To date we have 73% of our target of £500 pledged. £366 has already been pledged by 21 backers. We have 7 days left to reach out target, so please visit our Crowdfunder page by clicking on the link below for more information. This project will only be funded if at least £500 is pledged by 10.33AM on Thursday 17th July 2014. We need your support – the clock is ticking!
http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/The-Spice-Academy/
