M&S Telford

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.

The Community Food Project, based in Tan Bank, Wellington, launched in 2016 and thousands of pounds worth of food was collected this month alone. The scheme is run entirely by volunteers and it has no paid staff or directors. Food is collected seven days a week from restaurants and retailers, then immediately distributed to organisations which send the donations to those who are homeless, vulnerable or in need of support. Surplus food is also provided to regular food share events across Shropshire the county. On Christmas Eve, volunteers collected food from four Aldi stores. The project relies on generous donations from the public and businesses to keep going.

We are a specialist provision school that is set over two sites (Dawley & Hadley) We have several deprived families that struggle with both food and clothes for their children. Currently we are looking at setting up a clothes and food bank for both the children and families and this needs to be on both sites. We are looking to collect both food and clothes that will help and support our families in more ways than one, however, I don't like to admit but we also have members of staff that do struggle from time to time, so I would also like to support them too.