In 2015, FEAST With Us embarked on the mission to eradicate food poverty across London by ensuring that vulnerable people have regular access to both nutritious and delicious food. Since then, that’s what we have been doing! The last few months have been a whirlwind, with the demand for our services multiplying greatly since the COVID-19 pandemic began. To facilitate this rapid expansion, and the shift from community cooking and eating to a complex delivery service, we have excitingly been accepted onto the Aviva Community Fund. We are trying to raise £10,000 and we are well on our way there, but still need your help.
At Feast With Us, We have three main aims:
- To prevent malnutrition amongst vulnerable people.
- To reduce food waste.
- To encourage community cohesion.
Our entire operating centres around using intercepted food that we save from going to waste; endeavour to use reusable containers when delivering our delicious meals and are working towards improving our sustainability credentials and making stronger community-ties.
The COVID-19 outbreak has shifted the landscape of food poverty and has paved the way for a whole new wave of food insecurity to hit that is likely to affect a far greater proportion of the population than before.
Food Poverty: “The inability to afford, or have access to, food to make up a healthy diet” (The Department of Health).
In a matter of months, our aims as a charitable organisation have shifted from simply helping vulnerable adults suffering food poverty, to helping the many who are facing food insecurity as redundancies and recession hit our livelihoods hard. As such, the need to provide at least one hot meal a week has been overshadowed by the need to ensure that the meals we provide are meeting people’s basic needs to avoid malnutrition as access to food, and healthier foods in particular, becomes harder.
Alongside new partnerships and a constantly-expanding operation, we have made some exciting plans and headways into developing a tailored nutritional programme for our service users. We are working closely with one our own partner organisations to bring nutritional education and basic cooking skills to vulnerable young people, equipping them with the knowledge they need to transfer to their daily lives and live without dependence on charity.
Another important part of who we are is our commitment to tackling food waste. The subject of food waste has been gaining momentum in recent years and is firmly on the radar for being one of the most urgent social injustices and environmental issues that we need to fix. As we grow as a charity, we are able to dedicate more time and effort into working to achieve one of our core missions of reducing food waste in our own operations. From auditing our sites to developing training materials and resources our volunteers can access, we are hoping we can go so far as to make every single FEAST With Us cooking session, a Zero Food Waste session. By providing our volunteers with the skills and knowledge to reduce food waste in the kitchen, we can start to build these skills into every day habits that people can share across the wider community.
This is a game-changing time for FEAST With Us and we would really appreciate your support, be it in the form of donating or spreading the word about what we do! To find out more about the Aviva Community Fund, click the link below.
Interested in finding out how you can help FEAST With Us in our efforts to tackle food poverty? Get Involved today through our volunteering opportunities below or Donate To Us below.
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