Adults and families cooking together in a warm community hall in Peebles

Real Food, Real Budgets,
Right Here in Peebles

Vibrant Health Advocates – Solace runs practical healthy-eating sessions for families in Peebles and the surrounding Borders, giving households the skills and confidence to cook nutritious meals on a genuinely tight budget.

Get in touch
480+ Households supported annually
2,100+ Cooking sessions delivered
£1.20 Average cost per meal taught
About our work

Cooking together in the heart of the Borders

Peebles is one of the most beautiful small towns in Scotland — but beauty does not keep the heating on or the fridge full. The same forces that have made the Borders increasingly desirable have pushed up the cost of living for the families who have always lived and worked here.

At Vibrant Health Advocates – Solace, we have spent years sitting around kitchen tables and community hall counters with those families, learning exactly where the pressure points are and building a programme that meets people where they actually are: stretched for time, stretched for money, and sometimes stretched for hope.

Our hands-on cooking sessions, budget planning workshops, and one-to-one nutrition guidance are grounded in the reality of local shops, local wages, and local lives. We do not lecture. We cook, we share, we learn together — and we have seen, again and again, how quickly a household can transform the way it eats once it has the right knowledge and a little practical support.

Read our story
What makes us different

Practical, rooted, and genuinely local

🥕

Practical Skills, Not Preaching

Every session is built around the cooker, not the whiteboard. Families leave with recipes they have already made once, a shopping list calibrated to local prices, and the muscle memory that only comes from doing.

💷

Genuinely Budget-Conscious

We cost every meal we teach against what it actually costs to buy ingredients in Peebles, including from the supermarket on the edge of town and the discounted lines in local stores. Nothing on our menu exceeds £1.50 per person per serving.

🏡

Rooted in the Borders Community

We are not a national programme parachuted in — we are your neighbours, working out of community spaces in Peebles and trusted by local GPs, schools, and the foodbank to reach the families who need us most.

Our story

From one nurse's kitchen-table observation to a Borders institution

Vibrant Health Advocates – Solace began when a community nurse working in Peebles noticed a pattern she could not ignore. Patients were being advised by their GPs to improve their diets, but the honest answer was always the same: money, skills, time, and a sense that 'eating healthy' was something other families did.

She brought together a small group of like-minded people from across the town — a retired home economics teacher, a social worker, a local chef, and a handful of parents — and ran their first six-week cooking course in the back room of a community centre on a shoestring. The waiting list for the second course was longer than the course itself.

Our full story
Community team members outside a Peebles sandstone building

Our team in Peebles — the faces behind the sessions

Stories & advice

From our community kitchen

Real experiences, honest advice, and the people behind the programme.

Parents and children cooking together in a community hall kitchen
Cooking sessions

How Our Weekly Cooking Sessions Are Changing Mealtimes for Peebles Families

Inside the kitchen workshops where local parents are learning to feed their households well for less.

Read the story
Hands sorting vegetables and tinned goods on a kitchen counter
Budget eating

Seven Honest Ways to Eat Better Without Spending More in the Scottish Borders

Practical, tested advice for families in Peebles and surrounding villages who want more nutrition for every pound they spend.

Read the guide
A mother and children eating a home-cooked meal together
Personal story

'I Stopped Feeling Guilty at Mealtimes': One Peebles Mother's Story

Margaret hadn't realised how much stress she'd been carrying around food until a neighbour mentioned our programme.

Read Margaret's story
See all stories

Help a Borders family eat well this week

Whether you can volunteer an afternoon, donate the cost of a course, or simply spread the word — your contribution matters to families in Peebles right now.

Get in touch