Interview: Fiona Broome, Kermode Friendship Society
Photo by Nicholas Safran
We spoke with Fiona Broome ECCE/IT/SN/AECD/AIDP/CAP-C/CBDC Coordinator at Kermode Friendship Society in Terrace about a monthly take-home baking activity they are running within their CAPC program to support families.
Fiona coordinates a group of Family Programs at Kermode Friendship Society in Terrace, including Aboriginal Early Childhood Development (AECD) and CAPC. For example, the CAPC worker who is part of the department staff team has 21 hours a week for CAPC and the rest for AECD.
The grouping of programs within one department enables flexibility to customize programming to meet the needs of local families and creates opportunity to enhance CAPC provision for families. Inspired by different ideas shared in Coordinator meetings, Fiona and her team have originated two program ideas that they have developed over the past six months to support the families in their programs.
The CAPC worker runs two groups, each meeting once a month. The team decided that baking would work well in their situation, leading to the creation of a monthly Confection Bag. The worker introduces the recipe in the meeting and then each family is given a take-home Confection Bag, with quantities of ingredients customized to the size of their household, to take home and prepare with their family. To prepare the Confection Bags, they purchase the ingredients, then layer the dry ingredients in a jar. They attach the recipe and also provide the fresh ingredients needed to complete the recipe.
Fiona shops monthly for the Pantry program to support the families in their programs, which provides each family with a monthly package of meat, vegetables, fruit and dairy, using local ingredients wherever possible to tailor it to their own community. The team note how many children there are in a family, so they can budget and tailor the packages to suit the family size. The shopping for the Confection Bags can be done concurrently with the Pantry program shopping. Examples of the Confection Bags provided so far have included such items as Parfait, with frozen berries and granola, and gingerbread cookies, with shaped cutters provided so children can join in the baking. They focus on easy, accessible recipes for parents.
The Confection Bags have been welcomed by the families in the program and, working within budget constraints, the team has been able to provide one additional seasonal package so far this year, in addition to the monthly Confection Bag. This was a spring/summer Play Bucket, filled with chalk, bubble mixture, sand shovels and water balloons.
Fiona’s team try to encourage families to get out in the community to have fun together, and have run swimming and skating outings at the local pool and rink. During school vacations, older children are welcomed to join with their younger siblings in the program. They focus on familiarizing families with low-cost, accessible community amenities. If they are running a program where cost of materials is higher, e.g. for their drum-making workshops that they run periodically, they will limit the number of families per session, with enrolment on a first-come basis.