The Bradford Food and Financial Training Programme

Since the first COVID lockdown, we have been providing a basic food and toiletries parcel service to people in south Bradford, targeting those who are experiencing the most extreme financial vulnerability and our volunteers delivering them a mix of food and toiletries products once a week.  Whilst most of these people have been older people or vulnerable adults living alone, we have also helped families that are facing poverty.  The households we have targeted have at least one person with mobility issues, none of them have cars, and consequently there are issues with them accessing food banks in the City.  We have operated on a referral only basis where we have been given details of people in need from trusted third parties such as other local community groups and charities.

Whilst the lockdowns have ended, we have found the need for this service has continued to rise with the cost of living crisis.  As we cannot identify any other organisations in Bradford that deliver these basic items to people in need, last year we took the decision to expand our reach from just the south of the City to the whole of Bradford which we have now done.

At the same time, we also appreciate that people cannot be reliant on this kind of support forever and that, as much as can be reasonably expected, people do need to take responsibility of their situations.  We therefore also see the need to offer people free one-to-one training and coaching on financial resilience as part of this service.  This includes creating a household budget and how to stick to it, how to identify where they can save money, getting to grips with debts including consolidation and planning to pay them back, the dangers of gambling and how to identify gambling addiction, and why to avoid loan sharks and alternative sources of lending such as credit unions.

The idea is therefore to help as many people as possible with basic food and toiletries in order to live whilst also improving their ability to look after their own finances and improve their current situation as much as possible.

We are therefore looking to raise funds to pay for additional stock to expand our food and toiletries parcel service and also to pay for training and travel expenses for our expanding team of volunteers who will also deliver the financial resilience training and coaching.