A Heart & Parcel Update from Clare, Managing Director | June 2025
Over the 10 years, our incredible membership of over 1,000 ESOL learners, women and individuals from different communities have worked together to take part in, and to deliver informal, relaxed and fun provision with food and cooking to people who felt isolated, and perhaps needed a group to be part of, to gather together and to feel welcomed. We have felt so proud of all our accomplishments and to know that you have all played a big part in that through being our partners, supporters, collaborators, donors, it has meant so much to us having these waves, (oceans!) of support.
As many of you may know, running a grassroots project is already all encompassing. This is exacerbated through the environment we exist in currently in the UK: cost of living, austerity and an increasingly busier world  post pandemic, taking our time, care, energy, emotion and efforts. In the UK, we are also worryingly taking an inhumane step towards racist rhetoric, cruel practices and populist mythologies to win votes. This is simply enabling racism. This is not new. We started Heart & Parcel back in 2015 to reject unfounded assumptions on migrants by the UK government and consecutive cuts to ESOL and migrant provision. We even wrote a blog about it. From a government policy level, little has changed. Because of an increasingly hostile environment and its damaging effects on top of austerity, it is getting harder and harder to carve out space, time and resources for Heart & Parcel. Of course, in the face of such hostility, something like Heart & Parcel and other wonderful social community projects are what we really need right now. We have seen many positive impacts not just through our projects but other grassroots organizations working hard towards the same aims. But this hard work in this environment is truly exhausting, and we have a responsibility to look after our members, ourselves, our families and our communities. We need to be smarter and clearer about our time, energy, space and objectives if we want to have any chance of sustaining a safe and welcoming environment for ESOL communities and people seeking sanctuary.
We have decided therefore after many talks and meetings to take a long hiatus from our face-to-face projects.
We wish to regather, reflect and think about how we best want to serve our communities, individuals and ourselves. We feel this is absolutely the right thing to do at this time.
What we are doing now:
- We are working with our learners within our WhatsApp groups to signpost to other brilliant ESOL provision and social projects.
- We are keeping our very busy and popular online sessions open (self-study English, blogging and writing group) with access to all our free learning resources and our YouTube channel.
- We have set up progressions and review meetings with all of our cooking teachers to offer coaching, references, support and signposting to employability opportunities with great organisations we know.
- We are still selling our fantastic 2nd cookbook to cover our general running costs (website, zoom room, accounts, insurance) to make sure we keep a level of support to our members.
- We have a few especially incredible members of Heart & Parcel who are planning to run their own projects serving the ESOL community, so watch on our socials for updates very shortly!
- We also have developed, planned and created our very own 6-week cooking & ESOL pack that organisations, teachers, and ESOL classes can use to create their very own Heart & Parcel sessions! We wanted to share all our knowledge, advice and tips we learned over 10 years of running a project like this. You can access it via a small donation. The donations are used for general running costs: (website, zoom room, accounts, insurance)
Our email: info@heartandparcel.org will remain open and we will check this periodically. We will also keep our socials open for updates and signposting to our resources.
We want to thank you for all the support, the help, the belief in what Heart & Parcel grew to be. We will see you very soon!
