FOOD FOR THOUGHT BLOG | “Write, Eat, Share” Event – Speech by Clare

On 25th April 2025, we gathered at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, UK for our “Write, Eat, Share” event. This was a celebration of the projects funded by the Sam Orton Fund. In particular, everyone took part in activities from our creative writing sessions and we shared the work from learner-writers who participated.

Between the activities and wonderful food provided by Gashin, we had some speeches. Here is the speech from Clare Courtney, Heart & Parcel’s Managing Director and Co-Founder.

PART ONE

It’s a big joy to welcome you all to this fantastic event today at the people’s history museum to celebrate the final session of our creative writing and esol project. 

I hope the next few hours, or I know the next few hours will be full of interest, curiosity, learning and sharing, connecting and food of course. And theses have been the key to heart & parcel aims since the beginning in 2015, 10 years ago. These aims of language, food recognition and community are the heart of heart and parcel,  also the same themes of what we worked on when we were the incredibly lucky recipients of money raised in memory of Sam Orton,we called this fund, the SamOrton fund, and the money was raised during Sam Fest. 

Sam Fest was an evening back in September 2023 put on by Sam’s husband Bob, her family, her friends in Levenshulme Old Library and was to celebrate the life of a wonderful, kind and vibrant woman, Sam Orton. 

Bob and over 150 of Sam’s large and supportive community of friends, family and work colleagues, SamFest was a night of celebration, food, performance, reflection, poetry, music, connection, friendship, partying, laughter and good spirit.

They managed, through a silent auction of incredible artworks, prizes and classes, sessions, a raffle and donation to raise a whopping £9060 fir Heart & Parcel and its projects. I’ll just say that again – 9060 pounds in one evening. This is a huge amount of money for a small project like ours, and we got incredibly excited thinking about what we could do with the money – bob fundraiser. 

We wanted the money to be split into various projects aligning to our key values: Language, Food, Recognition and Community working with different communities around Manchester working with developing English language skills through food and cooking. and will be used with creativity, nature and learning in mind, paying respects to the things that Sam loved. 

The money spanned over 2 years and 7 months, and I just wanted to give you a quick overview of what we spent the money on and how many people’s lives it positively impacted. 

• Fundraising Learner-led Supper Clubs (Open Kitchens) – 3 with over 60 guests and 3 cooking teachers with their chance of putting on a delicious feast for our supporters and volunteers. 
• FREE 8 cooking  & ESOL Classes in Cheetham hill and Gorton – Cheetham hill 69 learners / gorton 52 learners
• From hong kong, sudan, syria, iraq, kurdistan, pakistan, egypt, afghanistan, libya. 
• Growing and Befriending Sessions at Debdale park – 23 sessions – 76 volunteers – growing, building, connecting, sharing and engaging. 
• We bought Aprons, new banners, kitchen equipment – knives, chopping boards
• Paid for eight cooking teachers to get their Level 2 health and safety certificates and their allergen awareness to carry out food related events and for their employability. 
• Final event – sharing 
• FREE 9 Creative Writing Sessions – 42 learners and 9 sessions – including a trip to portico library

This is just an incredible amount of achievements across over 2 years, and it’s just been an absolute dream to be able to create, prepare and deliver these projects so freely. It’s worth mentioning that we are a small project, not eligible for large pots of money and only able to tap into small funds for 1 project at a time. So donations like Sam’s with the huge efforts and love from her family and friends have meant we can create multiple projects, growing and tending to each one, and watching all the simultaneous impacts at once, creating just a wonderful garden full of care, attention and belief. I want to thank you for trusting us with this money, – and it wasn’t just about the money – to always have that invisible hand on your shoulder, encouraging you and supporting you through the very act of donating gave us the courage to run these projects.

I will be speaking a couple more times  throughout the event to give further thank yous, as we all know, it took many many people to run all the projects I’ve just mentioned, and I also wanted to speak more about the impact, and the foundations it has set for the future, but let’s get to the event!

The creative writing session was put on, as Sam loved poetry, writing and nature so much herself, this particular project was a direct way we could remember her and to support our learners in developing their english creatively, meaningfully and through different aspects of writing.

We had two wonderful tutors, Rebecca Hurst who did the first 3 sessions, and the wonderful Alex who took it on last year, delivering the project to its end, and working with our learners to create pieces that they wanted to write. 

When I spoke with Alex about the brief, we both agreed quite often learners in ESOL are expected to share their stories of migration, to share often their difficult and traumatic stories of coming to Britain and the life they live as they navigate here. Of course this has incredible significance, and is very very important in doing so. But we did not feel we were qualified to carry out this work responsibly, ethically and with the care and respect it deserves. For us, we wanted to stay true to our learner led and learned centred philosophy, which was that Alex could be facilitator, rather than teacher, and that the emerging language would be the lessons and the writing that would develop together, as a group. We had loose themes born out of the end of class learner evaluation to keep track based on nature, movement, dream jobs, personification, haikus and of course, our last session, as we thought appropriate, would end on food! 

PART TWO

By now you will have had a bit of a taste of what we do in our sessions, and perhaps more of an idea of how it feels to be a learner.

We also have a lot of impact from our volunteers and our learners.

Learners go on to do further study, or go into food related jobs for teaching work – we often act as referees for our teachers to support them in speaking on their behalf about their incredible abilities that are often unvoiced and unknown.

I also wanted to take a moment to talk about our volunteers. ‘They are the based and core of heart & parcel and without which it simply wouldn’t run. Recently we’ve been getting a lot of amazing comments from our volunteers expressing their feelings about taking part in our projects. Many feel it’s a space for them to connect with different communities other than their own, or they came to Heart & Parcel at a difficult point or transition in their life and wanted to try something different. There we see friendships and relationships born out of our classes and events that we are able to put on, creating these meaningful, respectful places where everyone is coming for a shared interest, to learn about food, sharing and connecting. 

We have found over the years that volunteer and learner feedback positively impact lots of correlation and similarities with each other.  

And because the project runs on a progression model, our learners are our teachers, our volunteers and our volunteers are our learners and so on. 

We keep hearing the same words that Heart & Parcel is a family. And this has huige resonance across cultures, people and communities. Creating cohesion is such an important part of what we do. And its something you can’t focus on directly, thay it needs to be created by the very people in the space. And this is the most empowering part of our projects. 

PART THREE

Of course a huge thank you to Liz from PHM for kindly offering the space for free to host our event. 

To Gashin for her delicious, delicious catering today and to Alaa for managing the food and catering. 

To you all for coming here and showing up taking an interest in our work

To our wonderful volunteers today to make sure everything ran smoothly. 

I want to thank all our incredible managers and teachers who made all these projects possible to the wonderful Hanane who project managed and facilitated our esol classes,

To the fabulous Alaa who managed planned and delivered the supperclubs, 

To our amazing directors and close friends Hafsaa, Karolina (who is also the co founder) and hanane, for keeping an eye on everything, supporting and advising when needed 

To Simona for supporting and coordinating all our volunteers to do these projects – to all our volunteers, you know who you are. We love you and we respect you so much with every single piece of support you give us by turning up to our sessions, and giving your care, time and connection. 

To our inspiring current teachers who cooked their way through these session, being generous with the knowledge and their food and their memories and experiences: Asmahan, Alaa, Faiza, Sara, Jenny, Liza, Ban, Najlaa, Chawarwan, Gashin, Zubaria, Rizwana and Zahra. 

To Rebecca who started our session off, and to our amazing talented and generous friend Alex who continued and took the project to its absolutely wonderful finish.

To HMHC and the Waiyin Welcome Centre for their venues and support. 

And to our learners, our incredible, inspiring learners with the bravery and courage showing up to our sessions to take part in connection 

To the incredibly humble and modest Bob, who was the drive behind this, with the huge support and equal drive of Sam’s family, colleagues and friends. 

And to Sam, for keeping things going.