7:00am Thursday 2nd July 2009
By Emma Joseph
FEEDING ourselves and our families is something most of us take for granted.
But as recession bites, more people are finding it hard to make ends meet, meaning a decent meal is not always a top priority.
But help is at hand in the form of Bournemouth Foodbank, which fed 1,800 local people between May last year and April this year, giving out more than 6.5 tonnes of food.
The initiative, run by Bournemouth Vineyard Church, averaged 10 parcels a week when it was launched in March 2008. But the figures are rapidly increasing.
“We’re now giving out 50 to 60 parcels a week regularly,” explained co-ordinator Vicki Lent.
“Some 80 per cent of people coming through our doors at the moment have benefit delays, which generally means they’re new claims.
“We have a huge range of people that come in.
“We’ve got someone who lives in a block of flats for people over 50 – there are people on pensions who are really struggling.
“We’re giving food to a local school for their breakfast club for children whose families can’t afford breakfast at home and we give perishable food to the night shelter, YMCA, women’s refuge, places like that.
“That’s given to us every day by Sainsbury’s.”
Bournemouth Vineyard Church set up the food bank after visiting a similar scheme at the Trussell Trust in Salisbury.
The trust wants a foodbank in every town in the UK so runs a franchise to enable other organisations to set up similar schemes in their own areas.
“You pay a fee to the Trussell Trust and they give you information and paperwork on how to run your food bank,” said Vicki.
“But we’ve adapted it slightly because every town has slightly different needs.”
Initial pleas during Harvest Festival two years ago saw three tonnes of food collected, which was stored in Vicki’s shed until the project found premises from which to run the foodbank.
“In the December of that year we had a launch at a local hotel,” said Vicki.
“We invited people in the care profession, councillors, local church leaders. We told them what we were doing and asked if they would come on board because it’s meant to be for the whole community.
“We opened and started running at the beginning of March last year with food we had gathered from the Harvest Festival.”
The scheme works on a voucher system in which various organisations, including the Citizens Advice Bureau, social services, Connexions and BCHA are given food parcel vouchers.
These are then handed to clients they feel are in need of the service who can exchange them for a three-day parcel of food made up for different sizes of family.
But clients are only given three vouchers by any one organisation, encouraging them to seek more long-term help for their problems.
“What we try and do is when people come in, if we get an opportunity to chat to them we see what their situation is,” explained Vicki.
“We’re not there to judge them, but we might know someone else that can help them.
“We also offer the chance for people to come in to do voluntary work and we also do NVQ placements.
“We’ve got volunteers with agoraphobia, for example, or really severe depression, or who are registered disabled.
“So there’s a range of things that are coming out of the food bank other than just food.”
Vicki is now concentrating on increasing food collections to meet the need, contacting supermarkets for help and even inviting individual shoppers to buy a couple of extra items.
“We aren’t talking about people that are homeless,” said Vicki.
“We’re talking about normal people that go out to work that may have lost their job for whatever reason.
“This is for the hidden poor. This is for people that are struggling day in, day out.
“We can just step into that breach for a period of time and give them a bit of leeway to have their boiler fixed or whatever it might be. Every child in the world should be able to eat.”
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