Desperate plea as Shropshire food charity is facing closure
A crisis support service that has helped 53,000 people in food poverty around Shropshire during the lockdown will be forced to close its doors this weekend if a safe place to store food is not found.
The Food Share project, which has temporarily been using a Telford community centre as its base during the lockdown, distributes food that supermarkets cannot sell to people in crisis around Shropshire and in Willenhall.
Since it was set up on September 20 last year, volunteers had been running pop-up events, turning up at community centres and distributing food that had been collected from suppliers the night before, before moving on.
Coronavirus and the lockdown presented an unexpected opportunity to help more people, as the Park Lane Centre in Woodside offered its then vacant space as a temporary base for Food Share. The volunteers were able to set up fridges, freezers, trolleys and more so that they could store more food and increase the quality of the meals they could distribute.
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But now the community centre is taking bookings again and Food Share have been given until this Saturday to find somewhere new, or go back to square one.
"We are absolutely desperate for space," said Lea Beven from the project.
"They really do need to open up again, we were only ever here temporarily.
"But we are totally reliant on the community to run things. We have volunteers, we don't get any funding."
'Absolutely critical'
Food Share has arrangements with dozens of stores from which it collects food that cannot be sold, and provides it to families who have found themselves in desperate situations.
Food comes daily from Tesco stores, Marks & Spencer outlets, Asda branches, Greggs and a number of independent suppliers of things like lettuce and cakes.
The charity needs a specific kind of space because of the large fridges and freezers it uses to store food, as well as its small fleet of Tesco vans that transport it: the space would need to be at least 2,500sq ft with tall doors and access for pallets.
Despite the country opening up again, Lea predicted that with the end of the job-retaining furlough scheme in sight and the festive period approaching, Food Share will soon be needed more than ever as more families slip into food poverty.
"It's just so sad," said Lea. "We've fed 53,000 people during the lockdown.
"In August alone we saved 35 tonnes of food from waste and given it to families – that was a quiet month. In our peak month it was 63 tonnes."
"It is absolutely critical that we are running right now.
"[Losing the space] will cut down what we can give to people. At the moment we can give full meals. We're talking sausages, chicken, vegan burgers.
"If we've got no electricity at all we can literally only do fruit, vegetables and bread."
If you can help provide a suitable space of 2,500 square foot for free, or a larger space to rent (with an initial rent-free period so Food Share can set up a food business), contact Lea Beven on 07768 656973.
The pandemic has hugely impacted on the nutritional health on some of the most deprived people in the UK, a Government watchdog found, with struggling families forced to subsist on basic diets without nutritional variety.
The Food Standards Agency found that ‘food insecurity’ has risen drastically since lockdown, as people’s incomes have been affected.
