GAIL's Bakery Marlborough

Positive Community Action ( ourpca.uk ) or PCA for short, started up at the very beginning of the pandemic to support our communities through the hardships covid brought, which included isolation, fear and poverty. Supplying food, medication, advice, library services, companionship and creative activity for anyone who needed it. We’re completely volunteer led and over the years have had almost 300 volunteers sign up to support thousands of vulnerable people. Check out our history on the website for a more detailed explanation of our roots. We developed what we did in the pandemic further to meet the changing needs of the community and now we run a number of services to help fight loneliness and poverty in Wiltshire.  We send out food and household supply boxes to families and individuals suffering from severe financial hardship, we save food from supermarkets that would otherwise go to waste and distribute it into the heart of our community where it’s needed most. We run a cafe and market where people can feel safe and make friends and they don’t have to pay if they are struggling financially it’s all completely donations based. We run a buddying service where people who are feeling isolated and lonely can chat on the phone with a volunteer who we match them with. We cook nutritious meals for vulnerable members of our community and deliver them to their door. And we organise creative events and activities for the whole community to get involved in. Everything we do is for free and everyone involved are volunteers.   We are funded mainly from donations from people in our community who we helped during the pandemic who now want to give back. We also have some grant funding which helps with the running costs of our community bus and rent for the hall we use for our free fruit and veg market and friendship cafe. Our HQ is a double decker bus fitted out with full kitchen and food storage room downstairs and our offices and creative space upstairs.. All the electrics are powered from the sun which allows us to take what we do into rural isolated communities.

Marlborough Community Fridge is a partnership project between Marlborough Town Council and Transition Marlborough. We redistribute fresh, good quality, in-date food that might otherwise not get eaten. Some supplies come from local food retailers including, but not exclusively, regular pick-ups from Waitrose, Tesco and Gail's bakery. We welcome unopened, in-date foods and home-grown produce from local households too. It is free to access, there are no criteria that have to be met to use it so it is open to everyone in the local community. We have a PYO herb garden and three further growing beds to complement the fridge and we're composting any actual food waste in a Green Johanna composter on site. A group of willing volunteers run the fridge and engage with local food retailers to build the working relationships needed to supply the fridge with a regular and varied supply of fresh and ambient foods.

We are FoodCycle, and our vision is to make food poverty, loneliness and food waste a thing of the past for every community. With community dining, week in, week out we feed the hungry and give company to the lonely in our communities; providing delicious meals and great conversation, and using food which would otherwise go to waste.