Sainsbury's Leyton High Road Local

Community Food Hub is a project started by Hackney charity Children With Voices in light of COVID-19 to support the vulnerable, homeless, struggling families and the elderly in our community in this difficult time. We collect donation surplus food to feed and support our community. We support families and children who face holiday hunger, and who, now more then ever, are having a difficult time due to lack of food, lack of access to benefits or difficulty accessing the right support. We need volunteers to help run our Community Food Hubs – dropping of food to the vulnerable and the self isolating, collecting our food donations from various locations, and in the day-to-day running of our hubs. We run 2 hubs around Hackney and are providing 60+ packages weekly, some for large families with small children. These families need our support and are the most at risk and vulnerable in our community – those with children who are carers to their parents, those whose first language may not be English, those who are self-isolating, those with mental health problems. We help by providing them with what they need to survive. We support our local communities.

We are a Community Centre based in Walthamstow that runs projects focusing on a community response to social and environmental issues. On Mondays, we run a Solidarity Supermarket where people can buy around £25 worth of groceries for £4.50. On Tuesdays, we run a free community kitchen where we cook surplus food and invite people to enjoy a free meal. Through our partners The Gleners, a Community Living Room runs every Thursday, plus their How To Cook A Feast course for migrants in the local area. On Fridays, we have a Wellbeing Cafe for people experiencing social isolation. We also redistribute food to local community fridges, food cooperatives, food banks and housebound individuals through our food hub and redistribution network. We have a network of volunteers who collect surplus food on their bikes from local shops and businesses, and are looking to expand this and engage with more local businesses to collect and redistribute their surplus food. When it comes to food waste management, we collaborate with local allotments that take our uncooked food. Just recently, we have launched our Green Hub For Waltham Forest, bringing together local groups involved in sustainability and responding to the climate emergecy.

The Leytonstone Community Fridge is a Transition Leytonstone project, working in partnership with The Community Fridge Network. We are working to reduce food waste at a local level by collecting food donations from charities, food businesses and individuals, making the food available to the public without discrimination, The Fridge, which is situated outside the Leytonstone Methodist Church, is open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, from 12 noon until the food runs out. It gets very busy, especially during the first half hour, and is manned entirely by volunteers. We need a steady stream of new stall volunteers and driver volunteers, as people do have other things in their lives! That said, we are a happy community of food waste warriors, who love nothing better than saving food from landfill and composting. A very recent 3-monthly audit shows that we saved two and a half tonnes from landfill between February and April 2019. We are currently fundraising for solar panels to power our 2nd backup fridge and a freezer in our food storage garage.