Urgent appeal! Coronavirus support work - new van

Aim

We need your help to get a zero emissions electric van for collecting surplus food and delivering to our community food clubs.

*Urgent appeal! - Coronavirus support work*

We are on the front line supporting vulnerable people who have been worst affected by the Coronavirus outbreak. We have adapted our food clubs to a food parcel service and are working with the local college to prepare and distribute cooked meals.

It is more important than ever that we can get a second van to make deliveries to those that are isolated at home. This situation is going to have long lasting effects and we want to be able to support all those who need help. Please support us by donating whatever you can.

Thank you

Our Story

We started a community food club when we saw that people in our community were struggling to make ends meet and to feed their families. We knew that a lot of good food was going to waste from farms, factories and shops. We thought a surplus food club would be a good way for people to come together in difficult times. It was a chance to build a community solution – getting the surplus food to people who could make good use of it. Not surprisingly, the club got full really quickly!

What's a Community Food Club?

Community food clubs provide local members with great quality food every week for a small membership fee of around £3. The fee pays the running costs of the club so it's a sustainable solution. The food is "surplus" from local businesses that would otherwise go to waste. The food clubs are also a social event with hot drinks and snacks provided. Members usually leave with around 2 full shopping bags, often equating to £30 - £40 worth of food. Members can choose what they want from what's available that week, just like a shop! We get great feedback from members and we know the the food clubs are making a real difference:

“Saved my life! I’ve been refused a council flat and I’m paying out more where I am. If it wasn’t for this place, I wouldn’t be able to eat. Haven’t eaten so well since I came here”

“We were struggling for a while but thanks to the food coop we managed to stay afloat, and now we keep coming back for the company.”

What is surplus food?

Food that is still perfectly good to eat but is no longer able to be sold in the normal way is designated as surplus food, and huge amounts of good food get wasted in our food system. 

For example, food is wasted at the farm level, sometimes when crop prices fall too low to make it worth harvesting, and when fruit and veg is rejected as too ‘wonky’ for supermarket standards. Or, food can be wasted in manufacturing when a problem with its packaging or labelling means that it gets thrown out. All food businesses can have surplus food and many end up throwing it in the bin. We want to help that food get to people who can use it.

What the heck is Eggcup?!

We set up Eggcup as a support organisation to make it easy for people to start and run a food club. We could see that the first food club was really working for people, so we started helping to set up new food clubs. However, we soon discovered that in some neighbourhoods it was difficult to get a club going. There’s a lot of work involved in running a food club and for some people it was just too daunting. That's when the idea of Eggcup was born!

 We raised money to get a warehouse and hire some staff. So now we can provide training, accounting, food safety assurance, and do all the heavy work of collecting and delivering the food. Basically we do all the behind the scenes stuff to enable local people to  run food clubs.

Eggcup's not about a charity handout, it's about supporting communities to deliver a sustainable solution for themselves through working together. Food clubs are a positive, sociable experience,  where members are encouraged to volunteer and help out, so everyone feels part of this solution.

What's next?

So now we’re beginning to establish new clubs in areas where people need some support to get started. We’ve got most things in place, but the stumbling block is we need another van. We have a big refrigerated van for bringing food donations into the depot, but it can’t be in all places at once. We need your help! To take food out to the new clubs, we need another, smaller van.

A second van would allow us to support 10 more food clubs – that’s 400 households who won’t be going hungry! We’d like an electric van – second hand, we’re not expecting miracles! We don’t want to contribute to air pollution around the city centre where people are shopping and kids are walking to and from school. We’re tackling carbon emissions by saving food and it makes sense to follow this through with the van. And electric vans are cheap to run and every penny helps. £5,000 would be a substantial contribution to us buying a second-hand electric van.

With your support, a new van will enable us to get more volunteers trained and actively involved, we’ll be able to save a lot more food from going to waste, community members will have the support they need to successfully tackle a problem in their own neighbourhood, and 400 households won’t be going to bed hungry.

Thanks for your support!

This project successfully funded on 22nd April 2020