Argos Oldham Town Centre (Inside Sainsbury's)

At Oldham Foodbank we try do more than just provide food for people coming to us. We find out if there is any other help or services there is a need for, we have computers for accessing online services and job searches. We are members of the Oldham Food Network and are able to share fresh / excess short life products to make sure we help feed bellies not bins! We also work with other organisations to help new tenants, We run Eat Well Spend Less courses to teach people basic cookery skills. Working with local charities Keyring and Christians Against Poverty, we are part of the Ancora Project which has been funded by the National Lottery for five years helping people through crisis Most of the basic foods we use are donated by the general public but we also welcome donations from businesses eg. stock over runs.

We started the soup kitchen four years ago serving soup from the back of a car outside Rochdale town hall one night a week. Within nine months we had enough volunteers to do this four nights a week and Saturday lunchtimes. We now have our own premises behind Champness Hall in Rochdale, from which we now aim to open a drop in centre seven days a week, serving lunches, soup kitchen in the evenings, providing hot showers, washing machine and drier, computers for applying for jobs and courses and medical services and counselling.

The Kitchen at 44 CIC is a community interest company working to help people deal with the social issues around food. A community kitchen and cook school will open soon but while building work is happening we're working with our local community to help people make their food budgets go as far as possible with a batch cooking club, community meals and demonstrations.