Neighbourly Partners

Inependent food banks, community fridges, social supermarket. We are a not for profit organisation that has been running since 2012. Currently we distribute over 40 tonnes of food a month to thousands of families. In particular the people benefiting are mostly in receipt of universal credit and D.L.A, or are currently to embarrassed to use a food bank, and ours has choice and dignity where our clients can choose what they need. Primarily we advertise as a climate change project that helps to reduce poverty by supplying food weekly in multiple areas, this reduces the stigma of use. This is to reduce food waste, help save the planet, and get children involved in organising and planning food shares. We work closely with the home educated community and many other zero waste community groups. Lots of our volunteers have long term mental health issues or are on benefits, and we are a lifeline to them both for food and the community. We have been doing humanitarian aid work in the local community and internationally for 7 years. We sent out 180 tonnes of aid in 2016/2017 to various organisations and supported many local families. In September 2019 we started The Food Share Project. A project covering Telford, Shropshire, West Midland and into Wales, to reduce food waste form the food industry, mainly supermarkets & wholesalers, and safely transport and distribute the food to the local communities via food banks. We evolved fast. When the Covid19 pandemic hit the UK and we went into lockdown in March 2020, the demand for our services of our independant foodbank increased hugely. We opened a discout pallet supermarket in September 2020 which enabled us to rescue and sell more food. The funds from our supermarket enable us to further support our independant foodbank. More recently we have reacted to the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine. To date, we have sent out 1000 pallets of aid on over 23 lorries to Poland. This has been distributed, via our partners on the ground, to the refugees in Poland and also into Ukraine itself. We run community stores nationwide.

Great Yarmouth Pathway is a transforming safe space of light, welcome and engagement for the community of Great Yarmouth to support those in need. We operate to address the poverty and social isolation that is so prevalent in the area. Our goal is to be a venue that accommodates a range of services and provision all under one roof. The support offered has four main strands to it: the provision of a hot meal three times a week via our community cafe, a foodbank session once a week to provide emergency food for people in crisis, provision of a warm, safe space where friendships and support can be offered and signposting clients to organisations who can help with their difficult and complex circumstances. In 2025, we served 15,692 hot meals and distributed 4118 food parcels to individuals in our local community.

New Forest Aquaponics cic regenerative culture hub. We aim to help the understanding of connections with all parts of modern life, and our biosphere. At our core is Aquaponics - the farming of fish and edible plants, as well as growing all types of food. To grow food we need good soil, and good people working together. Good people need food, somewhere to meet and grow the food, and to feel valued. We aim to set up a community owned farm in the New Forest. . We are keen to hear from anyone who could help us provide this resource for the Waterside area of the New Forest. I Some of our active projects, please let us know if you would like to get involved - help is always appreciated The Waterside Food Project - Feed people, Feed animals, compost. We firmly believe that no one should ever go hungry, no food should ever be wasted, and no food should ever go to landfill or incineration. We work with smaller groups across the Waterside, providing resources to make sure they can get access to supermarket excess food, by collecting the food and recognising who can make best use of what's been collected. The groups we work with provide support for low income families and provide emergency food parcels, or cook for the homeless. Food that cannot be eaten, but can feed animals, goes to animal groups, and anything that is left after the people and animals are fed is composted, the compost will be used to help teach food growing. Ecobricks UK - Teaches communities all about plastic, how and why we are in such a mess with it, providing methods of tracking plastic transition and how we can measure our positive impacts on our biosphere. This is done via workshops, online and in person. Support is offered as to how the ecobricks can be used to bring benefit to the community whilst sequestering the plastic out of the biosphere. Waterside Clothes Swaps - We all need clothing, and with the cost of living increasing buying clothes, even from charity shops ,can be out of reach for some. Combine that with the damage the textile industry is doing to our world, helping with both issues is super important, we do this via waterside clothes swaps. We are in need of support - could you donate towards our hall hire costs, or donate clothes rails or even clothes? The Virtually Real Forest - our project to create deep connections between children and trees. Again working with Blackwell Bushcraft we run workshops on trees and their importance to our biosphere. Each child is able to take a tree home to grow in a pot becoming a guardian of that tree. The tree is registered with The Virtually Real Forest, its journey can be followed, and support in caring for the tree can be given to the guardian of the tree. The aim of the scheme is to create more understanding of trees, and how they grow. More details are on the blog section of our website. We are looking for funding to provide the workshops to community groups and schools.