The Down to Earth Community Café is a welcoming place to meet friends and family, eat healthy food and even get involved in cookery sessions. The team behind the not-for-profit Café have created a welcoming shared community space with sustainability at the heart of all they do and how they do it.
Located in The Old Stables, Stirlings Close in a newly renovated building, the Down to Earth Community Café is only a short walk from the Waitrose carpark and can also be accessed via a footpath opposite the BP Garage (Wallingford Road and Seessen Way). The aim of the Café is to provide food in a ‘down-to-earth’, inclusive and friendly environment. The food they serve is delicious, healthy and affordable and they use as much surplus food as is available. The menu changes weekly depending on what food is collected from surplus food distributors in Oxfordshire. The fresh produce has not yet reached the supermarket shelves and would be destined for landfill. However, it is saved and used by charities and social enterprises to help supplement meal provision and to use in food larders. As Down to Earth has signed the Oxford Good Food Charter, they are given access to a network of businesses aligned to a vision for a vibrant, healthy and sustainable food system for Oxford and the county as a whole. The Café receives funding from Clarion Futures and their Small Steps project is funded by the WOVHDC and OCC.
During the year, the Café holds a few ‘Community Cook-In’ events. This is a collective and very sociable cooking session which is open to anyone who would like to meet others, cook a meal together and share sustainable food ideas. This culminates in a sharing of a meal with each other and anyone who would like to join in can on a ‘pay as you feel’ donation basis. These healthy food training sessions encourage creativity whilst using every day and affordable ingredients rather than a prescribed set of ingredients that are often hard to find or costly. It’s all about seeing what is in the cupboard and feeling sufficiently confident to create something tasty. By cooking together, sharing recipe ideas and learning about resourceful and sustainable cooking, participants can take ideas home to help feed themselves and their families.
The Down to Earth Community Café activities brings the community together in different ways which have a positive affect on both physical and mental health. The Café also hopes that they can build a sense of belonging and pride, as well as helping people to connect with others, make friends and generally improve their well-being. Customers are supported during the cost of living crisis too with affordable meals.
Various other community initiatives are run at the Café Down to Earth: their monthly Lunch Club, funded by Sustainable Wantage, helps bring pensioners together reducing their isolation and loneliness. Whilst the Chop and Chat sessions are a series of cookery classes for individuals referred by social prescribers at the Newbury Street and Church practices, which is funded by VOWH District Council. Inter-generational cooking sessions are also planned involving young people and residents of the OSJCT Stirlings Care Home. These will be funded by the Co-operative Community Fund.
Children are also catered for as the Café’s Small Steps project provides children with a healthy breakfast, a homework club, and environmental activities. These take place on a Saturday morning, facilitated by teachers and volunteers. Small Steps brings about environmental awareness and encourages children to make an impact on reducing the effects of climate change in small achievable steps.
Whilst generally Oxfordshire is an affluent county, it is a very expensive place to live and with the escalating cost of living crisis, the lack of affordable food is being felt month on month by local families. Having access to a community café which helps to address the lack of access to affordable food, also helps to ensure that those who are hungry and lonely have somewhere to go where they will be welcomed and supported.
For further information about the Down to Earth Community Café please visit downtoearthcafe.co.uk or their Instagram page @downtoearthwantage
