Winter Appeal for Christmas 2025

Aim

We want to ensure our clients can take part in traditional Christmas celebration and ensure we have food supplies into the new year.

Northern Devon Foodbank routinely supports around 100 households each week across the North Devon and Torridge area.  To supply a food parcel with enough to keep each household going for 3 to 4 days, this takes involves providing 2,000 kgs of food each week.

Generous residents, groups and Churches donate around 50% of this with supermarket surplus also being very useful.  Even using the cheapest own brand items this results in over £2,500 worth of food going out each week.  We budgeted £40,000 for food spend for the year, yet after our first quarter spend analysis it looks likely we will actually need around £60,000 to meet the food need for the financial year.  If this is correct our food funds for the year will be exhausted by Christmas, so we need your help to ensure that not only we can provide help at Christmas but well into the new year too.

In addition, our Christmas fund helps our clients partake in seasonal celebrations.  So much of Christmas is based around the shared meals with family and friends, those experiencing food poverty often feel unable to take part because they can barely manage to feed themselves let alone enjoy the Christmas meals together.  Our Christmas extras provided to clients in the two weeks running up to Christmas day gives families a chance to put on something a little extra for the family.

Our Christmas extras also includes simple gifts for the Children giving households the chance to make sure Christmas day remains a special day for the young ones.  Around a third of people helped by us at the Foodbank are under the age of 18, meaning we expect around 150 to 200 children to be given simple Christmas gifts that lift some pressure of food poor parents.  The levels of expectation add unnecessary and harmful stress and our support helps remove some of the burden of stress faced by parents.

Along with that we like to ensure Santa visits each of our 7 branches around Christmas, and during Father Christmas's busiest time of the year the foodbank is also extra busy helping families survive the extra bills.  We like to ensure Santa and his helpers are kept warm with refreshments to keep them from getting over tired sorting out all the presents and special foods for Christmas.  We don't want Santa and his helpers getting exhausted before the big day, so all the children of Northern Devon whether in food poor households or not get something miraculous to wake up to on Christmas day.

This project successfully funded on 14th January 2026