Connecting with communities at holiday lunches

In 2025, over 1,000 people engaged with our collections in community centres across Cambridge, supporting Cambridge Sustainable Food and Cambridge City Council’s holiday lunch programme. The programme combines activities and food education, alongside healthy free meals, as part of the community food poverty response in the city.

Food insecurity is at the heart of the cost-of-living crisis. A recent food standards agency report indicated almost one in four people in the UK are worried about being able to afford food. Over 60% of respondents eating food past its used by date as a money-saving behaviour.

The holiday lunch network in Cambridge in one of several initiatives from Cambridge Sustainable Food. It aims to provide free lunches and activities for children and their families during school holidays. School holidays can be stressful and expensive, and the average food bill can increase by 40%.

What happens at a holiday lunch?

Holiday lunches are regularly hosted at venues right across the city, from Meadows Community Centre and the Church of the Good Shepherd in Arbury to Clay Farm Community Centre in Trumpington. The offer also extends to newer communities such as Eddington and Darwin Green in the northwest.

Lunch sessions are typically two hours long. The first hour focuses on crafts and museum activities with food served afterwards, so there’s little risk of sticky fingers on handling collections!

The food is freshly prepared on site at the community centres by a group of volunteers from Cambridge Sustainable Food.

“I live locally. It’s lovely to come here and see all the kids enjoying themselves. It brings back memories of when my children were that age and hopefully they’re going to love the food that we’ve cooked for them.” – Volunteer at Cambridge Sustainable Food

Cambridge Sustainable Food are supported by Cambridge City Council, who coordinate and promote the sessions.

Caroline Gill, Youth Strategic Manager for Cambridge City Council, said: “The holiday lunch programme is a wonderful initiative that brings families together to enjoy good food, shared moments, and a sense of connection during the school holidays. At a time when accessing hot meals can be difficult, these lunches offer a welcoming space to relax and chat without the worry of providing a meal. Creating opportunities for families to gather around food in an informal, friendly setting plays a vital role in strengthening relationships and building community.”

Callouts for lunches happen two to three weeks before the holiday. The museums attend as many of these as they have capacity for. Attendance forms a key part of our programming for Twilight at the Museums and Summer at the Museums.

How do our museums contribute?

Since 2023, staff from across the University of Cambridge Museums have been regularly attending the holiday lunches. For some collections, the lunches are part of an established relationship with a particular ward of the city. For others, they are the main opportunity for off-site community engagement.

The lunches are well attended, with an average attendance of over 30 people per session in 2025. The February and April lunches at Meadow’s Community Centre in 2026 were both attended by around 100 people. Improved promotion, through the city’s Low-Income Family Tracking platform (LIFT), and more activities, including film screenings, have likely contributed to this increase. However, these numbers should also serve as cautionary indicators of the greater need for free meals and social spaces too.

“The holiday lunch was a joy! I’m really glad I could make it to one… The gravel was a hit as always. Lots of parents downloaded the new guide we have on the website.” – Amy Barker, Learning and Engagement Assistant at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences

What do the families think?

As well as food and activities, the lunches offer families an opportunity to socialise and build community. Parents from the Meadows Lunch Community Centre said:

“We get a beautiful atmosphere. The kids have a nice playing and nice activities and nice food. And all the people around is very nice.”

“My little ones really enjoy looking at the stuff that Roz [Museum of Zoology] has been doing. It’s nice for them to have a look, obviously out of school or nursery. It’s a nice environment. Keep them away from screens, mix with other children and it’s nice for like parents’ mental health as well.”

“It’s a great event for families to meet each other and make new friends. It’s also nice to see what the community centre and the museums have to offer for families and their children.”

Our presence has led to families visiting the collections and engaging with our resources, but meeting the families where they are is important. Project workers from the Red Hen Project, a charity supporting young children and their families in North Cambridge who are experiencing challenges in their lives, regularly attend holiday lunches too. They know and work with many of the families and have noticed the impact the collections attendance has.

Stacy Bainbridge, Lead Project Worker at the Red Hen Project, said: “We love seeing the museums at the holiday lunches because for a lot of the families we work with it feels really inaccessible and for them to come to a holiday lunch and get to join in here, they get to feel included and actually that they’re not scary, intimidating places. So we think it’s brilliant.”

What’s next?

There will be a lot of opportunities to join during the summer holidays and beyond. I will attend more of the holiday lunches to gather feedback to build up a better picture of the impact the collections have at the lunches and if we are best meeting the needs of the families. The University of Cambridge Museums will also help support collections with taxis to and from the venues.

If you are interested in finding out more, or have thoughts or ideas you’d like to share, please contact me.