Pendle Food for All - it's not just about food!

Aim

We want to switch up the heat on our weekly food club & look at nurturing our volunteers and members with opportunities to grow and move on

We want to develop our weekly food club and build on the successful  and impactful volunteering and social action opportunities we provide. At the Food Club, we currently serve 100 members (households) during a 3 hour period on 1 day a week. We have constant demand from local residents on low incomes to become members, but we have reached our capacity at the moment in terms of food, volunteers and paid worker support. We also have a waiting list for people offering to volunteer. Our current capacity means that we don’t have enough ‘work’ to take on any more volunteers.

Our focus of this next period of our clubs development is not just feeding local people but nurturing them to move on in their lives and aspirations, whether it be into paid employment, other volunteering or training and education.

We currently provide healthy, good quality food for £5 a week, which is worth at least £25. So, we provide great value, enable people on low incomes to budget, and provide them with choice and dignity. Alongside this we offer opportunities for volunteering, socialising and support e.g. referral to counselling, debt management, energy efficiency advice and some nhs services. We have also set up a sewing group which is volunteer led. We know that there would be more demand for the Food Club wrap around services if we had the capacity to expand. Services include low cost healthy food, opportunities to move into paid work, increased community cohesion, reduced social isolation. 

We would use any funding raised to train and develop current and new volunteers and seek to provide via sessional workers a peer support mentoring scheme to help our members and volunteers move on to the next stage.

We currently serve 100 members (households) during a 3 hour period on 1 day a week. We have constant demand from local residents on low incomes to become members, but we have reached our capacity at the moment in terms of food,

This project successfully funded on 1st March 2023