A course in cooking healthy meals will be offered to people using a Newport food bank thanks to a grant through Newport City Homes.
Stow Park Community Centre also helps people to learn how to repair clothes and grow food. Parents and carers bring their children to a play scheme in the centre.
Volunteers have been awarded £805 through the social landlord’s community benefits scheme to help their work.
Umbra Construction are building 18 one and two-bedroom apartments for Newport City Homes in Upper Dock Street with commercial units on the ground floor and they wanted to help a local project.
Mandy Scott, from Stow Park Community Centre said: “This fabulous amount of money is going to help us run two of our basic life skills courses, sewing and cooking. Sewing machines are expensive.
"The money will go to buy extra machines so we can teach more people in our class. And for the cookery course we need a new urn and a tabletop fridge. It means we can give more people the opportunity to come on these course and learn their basic life skills.”
Graham Kuhlmann, senior project manager for Umbra Building Services, said: “We really love to support local communities around our sites through the community benefits fund. You can see how much of a smile it brings to their faces and how much of a difference it makes to their organisations.”
Laura Palfrey, Newport City Homes’ development partnerships coordinator, said: “The popular centre provides a wide variety of support from food parcels to being a place for children to play.
“Demand for the food bank has shot up during the pandemic so the course will give people the skills to make the most of their parcels to make healthy, nutritious meals for low cost.”