Speaking of Food CIC (SoFCIC) knows that food is the lynchpin for everything else in life. We have been working with several other projects in 2025-2026 spanning arts and culture, home cooking skills and having an input on solving food and health issues.
- Community Curator for the Dining Room, Touchstones, YourTrust
- School for Social Entrepreneurs Trading for Good programme
- BigPan community cooking ambassador for Rochdale Food Partnership
- Make This recipe cards with Food Solutions funding from Action Together
- WEA Life Skills programme delivery
Touchstones museum in Rochdale closed in 2024 for refurbishment. When reopened (in early 2027) there will be a food theme, including the Dining Room housing the cafe and food related exhibits.
YourTrust recruited 20 Community Curators to discuss and develop the Dining Room space, including SoFCIC. We have been immersed in pottery and textiles, developing themes for the exhibits and seeing what’s in the archive that will bring stories to life, and thinking a lot about food of course.
We hail from a mixed bunch of global cultures and its been fascinating, and tasty, to discover different ingredients and dishes. We also realised that many ingredients we use are the same across cultures, we just make different dishes with them!
There is a Dining Room tile on ‘Current Projects’ on the Touchstones website if you want to read about the input of the community curators and see how the refurbishment is coming along. Here’s a link to a delicious green sauce – zhoug, thought to originate in Yemen, that SoFCIC introduced to the group.