As youth unemployment in Birmingham threatens to bubble over, the appetite for “green skills” continues to grow.
Young people continue to fall through the cracks across the UK. NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) levels are spiking, and unemployment rates in Birmingham stood at 18.6% in 2025. The UK job market risks squandering the time of a generation with the potential to make a difference in transitioning to a greener, more sustainable economy. Not to mention the knock-on mental health effects for thousands of young people who are slipping through the cracks of an increasingly uncertain employment landscape.
Since January, I’ve been running the “Cooking Up Change” Gen22 Food and Social Action Project at ChangeKitchen CIC, as a productive response to the growing problem of youth unemployment in Birmingham.
With funding from Unitedby2022, this project offered 16-25-year-olds across Birmingham 30 hours of voluntary work experience – providing the chance to gain work experience (with references for jobs offered at the end of the programme!), develop employment skills, and make a genuine difference cooking up change by helping with producing ChangeKitchen CIC’s tasty, fresh, climate-friendly food, inspired by the many cultures in the city for our free meals for people in need AND our event catering menus.
The result has been fantastic!
So far, we’ve engaged 32 young people in over 600 hours of work experience in our social enterprise kitchen.
The social value of this project has been many fold.
From every carrot diced, to every pot washed – each minute our volunteers have spent with us has somehow contributed to our social mission – whether through helping prepare HAF meals (Holiday Activities and Food) for Children on FSM (Free School Meals), supporting families in need during the holidays, or minimising food waste through cooking up “surplus” ingredients, provided by partners like FareShare Midlands. Meanwhile, this project has allowed our young volunteers to craft and hone new skills, providing a lily-pad to jump off into future employment.
Each volunteer arrived at the kitchen for a different reason, developing a different set of skills from a different set of experiences. From Culinary Arts students seeking a professional kitchen to practice their craft, to people with next-to-zero prior cooking experience learning to cook for themselves; from volunteers using the opportunity to develop their English-language skills, to meet new people and make new connections; or, crucially, those volunteers for whom ChangeKitchen CIC represents their first foray into the world of work – the Cooking Up Change programme has developed a portfolio of skills as rich and diverse as the group of volunteers that engaged with us.
Here’s what our volunteers had to say about the experience…
“It benefited me in many ways besides cooking, including boosting my self-confidence and learning how to adapt to working as part of a team.”
“It helped me form a routine for myself and start the day well.”
“It’s instilled the sort of work ethic I think will be useful in the world of employment and it’s allowed me to connect with a helpful cause in a heartening way”
“I’m an introvert and working at ChangeKitchen CIC helped me open up more.”
We love and appreciate these quotes from ChangeKitchen CIC’s ‘Cooking Up Change’ Gen22 Food and Social Action Project volunteers!
What projects like these reveal is that there is a generation of young people who have the capacity, skill, energy, and drive to acquire the green skills necessary to make a difference. There is a potential for change in a generation consistently denied a stable footing on the economic ladder.
Just when green skills need to drastically proliferate, opportunity has never felt more restricted for young people. The time is ripe for offering this generation the chance to push change towards a greener economy.
We concluded our project with a celebration lunch at ChangeKitchen CIC’s Kindness Cafe. Volunteers caught up with the familiar faces and met new ones. We shared food and stories of what new paths people had pursued after volunteering at ChangeKitchen CIC. Crucially, we celebrated the achievements of our volunteers with certificates commemorating success, and – in true ChangeKitchen CIC style, with a feast of fresh, vegetarian, climate-friendly food.
Thank you to all our volunteers! We hope they continue ‘Cooking Up Change’, wherever the next step takes them.
James Leach
Community Engagement Officer | email
