The Feed, the social enterprise which aims to prevent poverty, hunger and homelessness in Norwich, launches plans to take its great food on the road, today. Chris Elliott explains why he’s optimistic that the charity will be out and about at events this year
In the latter part of 2019 and into the first couple of months of 2020 things were going really well. Our café on Prince of Wales Road in Norwich was thriving, with a mixture of customers: those on their way to work, commuters who had taken the train into the city, people grabbing a morning coffee and cake, then the lunch time trade. Likewise, our catering operation was growing well – providing a range of food to businesses for their events, staff meetings, training days and business entertaining.
This was all helping us generate more of our own revenue to help our mission of preventing poverty, hunger and homelessness in Norwich. We do that by providing support to people one-to-one, in group sessions and by giving people out of work the chance to gain work experience with us.
In the first lockdown, things changed very quickly as our café closed and the demand for catering from businesses ceased. Delivering face to face support for people also had to stop.
We adapted speedily to provide food parcels to rough sleepers who had been placed into emergency accommodation. From April to June, we made and distributed 4,500 lunch bags across the city. In addition, we made hundreds of phone calls to people we were supporting to keep in touch. We also sent out packs of useful information, details of online resources and some fun things too all designed to look after their wellbeing.
In August we launched our Community Fridge as a direct response to a need for food from individuals and families unable to provide this themselves. The food is available for anyone to collect each Monday-Friday from 2-4pm on a ‘no questions asked’ basis. As well as chilled items, there is always a wide variety of fruit, vegetables, tins and packets. In around five months we have distributed more than 7,500kg of food with more than 1,600kg of this being saved from waste.
Our Mince Pies with Meaning campaign has run for several years and the meaning is that through buying our mince pies you know you are funding our work to help people in Norwich. We coupled this up at Christmas by selling hampers of great Norfolk food products with the commitment that for each one sold we would give a hamper of essential food plus some treats to a vulnerable local person. Offering these ways of buying local food, helping our work and knowing people in our community would benefit, resonated strongly after such a tough 2020 and we were delighted with the support we received.
The latest lockdown means our café and catering is once again closed for the time being. Our Community Fridge is an essential service and remains open. We are delighted to have had food donations from many restaurants, food retailers and others in our city.
We are still pushing ahead with our plans to expand so we can self-generate more of the revenue we need to operate, help more people and create new work experience opportunities. One way we will do this is by having our own food truck to be able to attend all kinds of events in Norwich and elsewhere in Norfolk. Whether they are food or music festivals, corporate events or private family celebrations, we want to be able to take our great food to where it’s needed. There are reasons for optimism that outdoor events will be able to take place this summer and we want to be part of that scene.
It was recently announced that a new partnership project called REST was launching in Norwich. REST stands for Recover, Eat, Support and Talk and joins up mental health support, local services and a place where everyone can feel welcome. When the venue is ready, and restrictions allow, The Feed will be running the café.
This model of being a food provider in different settings is one we will continue to explore through 2021.
Visit The Feed
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