Pulling Together Asian Women's Group

This month at Pulling Together we finished our Curry In A Hurry boxes. Thank you to everyone that shared the images of the delicious dishes they created. Lots of the group said that the boxes were a great help in the month of Ramadan because they took the stress of deciding what to cook at Iftari time and also that using the fresh, healthy products that were delivered to them meant they were less inclined to buy junk food or fry food each evening. They also said that they would keep all of the recipe cards and refer back to them when they wanted a delicious, healthy meal.

This month at Pulling Together we have continued with our A-Z of Mental Health and Wellbeing project. After discussing where we can get help from the young women have been designing our banner. We are excited by some of the wonderful and thought provoking designs that have been created.

This month at Pulling Together we started our latest project funded by GMVCO. The project followed on from our recent projects about Mental Health, Anxiety and Wellbeing. Last year we discussed the report on suicide proportionally higher in young Asian women. The women said they were very concerned as it highlighted the pressure on Asian women by families and their community. As so many factors affect wellbeing the women created a list of what impacts on wellbeing which has now become the idea for this A-Z of Mental Health and Wellbeing project. This project will increase confidence and knowledge whilst giving the young women the opportunity to learn how and what to do to ensure they begin to understand mental health and wellbeing in an informative and fun way while simultaneously be able to highlight sensitive issues with appropriate health professionals.

We will hope to create individual scrapbooks about what we consider essential to our health and Wellbeing and include images of friends and family that we can ask for help if we need to talk. We will also look at where to find professional help if necessary and use this as a resource at the group for the young women to access if they need to. Collectively we will add images created/collected by the group in an A-Z banner that will be displayed in the local library.

This month at Pulling Together as well as welcoming in a New Year we also continued with our Curry in Hurry boxes project. We sent out more boxes for everyone to prepare and once more the response was all positive. Many of the younger members of the group enjoyed being able to prepare a recipe from start to finish knowing that all the ingredients were at hand. Some of the group even found new recipes to prepare using the food that was sent out to them. Thank you to all that shared your wonderful photos of everything you prepared.

This month at Pulling Together we were able to send out our first Curry in a Hurry boxes. We included the recipes cards and all of the ingredients. Feedback from the group was very positive and they are looking forward to receiving their weekly recipes and boxes. Most of the group enjoyed the way in which the recipes were easy to follow and a hit with all the members of the group.

This month at Pulling Together we began our Curry In A Hurry project. We began to look at recipes that could be sent out to our group and what would we need to buy to make our make at home boxes. We also collected family recipes that have been made and handed down and members were willing to share.

After looking at which recipes we would make we began to design the recipe cards that would be sent out with the food boxes.These were designed by various members using Canva and everyone agreed that the skills that they learned from designing these recipe cards can be used in other aspects of their lives including working on CVs.

Over the next few weeks we will send out the food boxes to the group and look forward to seeing what the group thinks of our Curry In A Hurry boxes.

At the end of October we were given the news that we had secured funding from The National Lottery Community Fund for the exciting project: Curry In A Hurry. The project will involve us delivering boxes of  ingredients; individually portioned for cooking meals at home and delivered straight to the young women’s doors over a period of 6 weeks. . This project will help to help raise awareness of healthier diet options through gaining knowledge on recipes and nutrition which can be used to improve health and well-being.This project will teach the women healthy portion sizes – not too small but not too big either. All ingredients will be pre-portioned before delivery so there is a huge reduction in food waste – helping the impact on climate change/cost of living. Therefore helping us to eat an appropriate amount of food so as not to gain weight and saving money at the same time. Over the next few weeks we will look at how the food will be delivered, choosing and designing recipes to send out in each box and how we will collect feedback on each recipe.

This month at Pulling Together we continued with our Relationship Realities project by beginning to build our personal scrapbooks of the people we see as our special relationships. Thank you to everyone who was happy to share their images

Using words we began to build word clouds about what is important in a good relationship.

We also created one for relationship that were not as positive.

The group talked about how when finding yourself in a new relationship being caught up in all of the feelings that come with this can often mean that we alienate ourselves from old friends and family in fear of disapproval but the best that we can do is to keep a balance with our old and new relationships and seek advice if we think something is wrong.

This month at Pulling Together we have been working on our latest project Relationship Realities: You, Me and Us. We have been looking at the different relationships and how to try and make healthy choices in making new relationships and what to do to maintain existing relationships.

Looking at the types of relationships we all go through in our lives: friendship, aquantance, parent-child, teacher-student, romantic, sibling, neighbour, classmate, mentor, team-mate, co-worker, boss-worker.

We also looked at what makes a healthy relationship and discussed how to decide if a certain relationship is good for you.

The group decided that they would like to make individual scrapbooks about their healthy relationships

and what each person means to them and how these relationships develop over time.

This month at Pulling Together we completed our Heartstone Banner. It was wonderful to see how the individual panels came together to tell a story of its own. A story of a local group who shared their own histories whilst meeting and creating the textile and chose what they thought best told the story of Chandra and the mice in the search for the Heartstone. Her experiences with racism was something we could all identify with and her courage to overcome these attitudes was what we all have had to do in the past. Using the Union Flag cloth as a backing for our banner was a choice made by the group by showing how the flag is often hijacked by groups who are against immigration and can make us feel uncomfortable in feeling proud for the flag of the country we have all chosen to call home. The most exciting news is that the banner will go on show in the Trafford schools that took part in the project including Urmston Grammar School.