Sainsbury's Washington

In the North East alone over 800,000 tonnes of food waste is generated every year. That’s over a third of food produced for us to eat. We think that’s rubbish and we hope you agree. We use our cafe as a platform for campaigning and educating people about food waste. All members of the community are welcome and we get up to 600 people through our Cafe per week. We don’t see this food as ‘waste’, we see beautiful and valuable food, and we see the energy, time, fuel, water and other resources that have gone into making it, packaging it and getting it to our supermarket shelves. Join us in giving it value and stopping this waste of resources.

Hopespring is award winning charity specialising in delivering quality services to children, young people and their families and providing therapeutic care. We have two Therapeutic Schools across four sites and an Ofsted Registered Family Centre. Every week we provide food for care experienced young people living in Sunderland who have just recently moved on to independent living. Every Christmas we provide a good quality and thoughtful Christmas present for every cared for experienced baby, child and young person. On average we provide 800 presents and 200 luxury Christmas food hampers for our care experienced young people every year.

We deliver our mental health services in a ‘safe space’, where people feel accepted, comfortable and are able to access the support they need. We moved to our current premises The Life House in June 2013, providing a much needed wellbeing resource centre for the community. The bigger premises enabled the organisation along with key partners to deliver a wider range of wellbeing services, develop new partnerships and provide a healthy environment for service users and our staff and volunteers to work in. We offer an open referral system so that anyone can refer to make our support as accessible as possible, a telephone call or popping into the Life House is all that is needed to start the process. Our support is built around choice and current activities include: information resources (including websites and digital resources), counselling, alternative therapies, telephone support, therapeutic group work, psycho-educational sessions, wellbeing activities, training and volunteering opportunities. Genuine service involvement is at the heart of all that we do and we endeavour to challenge and reduce stigma and discrimination.