Get involved
There are lots of ways you can help Bags of Taste achieve its mission to help people move and stay out of food poverty. Here are just a few!
Volunteering is a powerful shortcut to personal happiness. When you spend time helping others find their feet, you will be amazed at how much joy and fulfilment it brings back into your own life.
Make a life-changing difference
Volunteers are key to everything we do, and have helped change thousands of participants’ lives. Please help us make a life-changing difference to families’ diets and finances.
Volunteer as a Bags of Taste cooking mentor
At Bags of Taste, we deliver our Mentored Home Cooking Programme to 2,500 people each year, with incredible feedback. By volunteering as a mentor, you’ll help someone improve their diet, health, and finances—while making a real difference from anywhere in the UK.
Our courses are delivered via WhatsApp or phone, making them flexible and easy to fit around your schedule. You’ll need to commit 2–3 hours over two weeks, and you can choose to support just one course at a time. Most participants cook in the evening, so it’s simple to check in during breaks or after work.
You don’t need to be an expert cook—what’s important is being supportive and encouraging. We provide all the teaching materials, recipes, and step-by-step videos, and there’s always a coordinator available to back you up.
It’s a hugely rewarding role, and we’ll provide full training and ongoing support to ensure you feel confident every step of the way.
Join our friendly, dedicated team of volunteers
Without our wonderful volunteers we wouldn’t be able to continue to make such a difference to people living in food poverty.
With significant increases in food bank usage and the economic uncertainty of the cost of living crisis and rising energy bills, our work is now needed more than ever. Today, we have 200 volunteers supporting us – but the more support we have, the more we can do together!
We need people (like you) to help us with:-
Shopping and local food delivery
Are you available to help with shopping or packing or delivery of our ingredients and equipment bags in any of our locations?
Ideally, you have a car or bike, while in some areas, it might be possible on foot.
You’ll be playing a key role in supporting our students and starting them on their cooking journey!
I.T.
We are looking for support from people who have experience in IT, particularly with experience in Monday.com and javascript databases. We work with over 2,500 people a year and our IT infrastructure is critical to our ability to do this.
Our IT systems enable us to register and track our students through the course, gather evaluations and provide critical analyses to help us understand where things are going well and where there are any issues. They also support our fundraising and operations management.
Public Health Outreach
As part of our mission, Bags of Taste is keen to work in as many areas and reach as many people as possible! We need help identifying and contacting Public Health and NHS professionals and assessing local health priorities, so we can raise awareness of our work and how we can support them to reduce health inequalities in their local area. If you are able to help with this, please do get in touch.
Marketing, fundraising and administration
Do you have marketing, research, business development, admin or networking skills? We need to raise our profile and awareness of what we do to recruit new students, get new referrers and raise more money.
You can help research potential funders, contact people or make applications. We will support you and provide you with valuable experience and knowledge that will both enhance your CV and introduce you to new contacts and potential opportunities .
If research and evaluation is your thing, we occasionally have projects where you can help us carry out interviews and research that measure our impact.
We’d love to hear from you and chat about how you can help us help people overcome and stay out of food poverty.
Dani’s story
“I decided to get involved during lockdown to help the Sheffield community during a difficult time where many people are isolated and in financial difficulty because of the pandemic.
Cooking is a big hobby of mine so I really enjoy getting to combine something I enjoy with teaching people from different backgrounds to cook healthy and tasty meals on a small budget.
I love the community vibe within the groups and that it gives people new-found confidence when it comes to cooking.”
— Dani, volunteer
Ben’s story
“Volunteering with Bags of Taste is one of the best decisions I have made and I’d encourage anyone with an interest in food or healthy eating to get involved!
It’s hugely flexible and only takes a few hours each month. It’s an extremely rewarding journey and it’s been amazing to see how someone’s eating habits, and whole life, can change in just a few weeks!
I have loved meeting so many new interesting people and am so proud to be part of an organisation that is making a difference.”
— Ben, volunteer
More ways to support us
Volunteering is a great way to support Bags of Taste but there are other ways to support us, including fundraising directly and fundraising partnerships.
Why partner with us
Partnering with Bags of Taste will bring your organisation many benefits, including:
- Improved staff morale, engagement and motivation
- Brand exposure for your organisation
- Fulfilling your corporate social responsibility objectives
- Helping staff recruitment and retention
- The opportunity to make a massive difference in your local community
- Volunteering opportunities that can provide your teams with additional skills, networking opportunities and lots of fun
How we will support you
We want to build long term partnerships with organisations who share our aims to help people live healthier and happier lives.
We’ll support you by:
- Providing a dedicated contact
- Positive PR through all our channels
- Engaging volunteering opportunities for your team
- Providing lots of ideas for your team to fundraise, tailored to your preference and needs
Slaughter and May
Slaughter and May are a leading, international law firm based in the heart of London, which is home to both the capital’s most highly-valued companies and its most deprived communities. We’re both grateful and honoured that they’ve chosen to support us.
“We’re delighted to support Bags of Taste as part of our community programme. Our office is in Islington, which is often mistaken for an affluent area, but in reality it has the 10th highest level of child poverty in the country and the 4th highest level of deprivation affecting older people. It’s vitally important to us that we help our local community thrive, and supporting people in food poverty is hugely important.”
— Lucy Elliott, Community Programme Manager, Responsible Business, Slaughter and May
The Slaughter and May staff team taking part in the Bags of Taste spice bagging challenge
Second Nature
Second Nature supported Bags of Taste by doing a London to Paris bike ride
Leon
Leon supporting Bags of Taste with a donation add on at their till point
Fundraise
Help fund our journey to tackle food poverty directly and help us empower people to cook nutritious, affordable meals for themselves and their families and to develop the resilience to maintain healthy habits throughout their lives
Here are just a few ideas for fundraising for Bags of Taste:-
- Hold a supper club, like our sister project Supper Club, using some of our budget meals to raise funds for us.
- A Bakeathon (with an emphasis on health and value)
- Organise a corporate team-building
- Take up a new activity or sport – e.g Couch to 5k, or set your own daily running, swimming, skipping or hopping goal– reach for the skies! –, and ask your friends and social media contacts to sponsor it as a fundraiser for Bags of Taste
- Join an organised event – or organise one yourself; a hike, swim, skydive, balloon-ride, and involve your friends and family, company or the local community
- Ask your company to support us in lieu of Christmas cards, or to give us a donation this Christmas?
- Give up your naughtiest treat for a week/month (choose your ‘poison’ and deadline!) and donate the money you save to Bags of Taste. This could be a swear-box!
- Throw or participate in car-boot sale and throw out your unwanted clutter at the same time – or use an online platform like eBay or Vinted and donate the proceeds to Bags of Taste
Whether you do something big or small, you can be sure that it will make a massive difference to people in food poverty.
We’ll provide you with fundraising materials, advice and support and loads of encouragement along the way, and promote your fundraiser across all our social media
To get your fundraising started, you can set up your online page and start raising money online today at Local Giving
Or contact us – we’d love to chat and help make your ideas happen!