Neighbourly

A group of Churches uniting to alleviate food poverty by operating "Top Up" Shops from various Churches in Ipswich through redistribution of surplus food and non food items. Also creating an access point for people to use the services of outside agencies such as debt advice, healthy living, and general wellbeing.

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.

(the company’s objects are:- (a) to support positive change in people's lives; (b) to promote equality and diversity and racial harmony based on equal value of all persons; (c) to promote the intellectual, social and physical well-being of all people who are deemed to need our service; (d) to advance education to enable people to improve their understanding of the world, of themselves and of one another; (e) to advance citizenship and community development to encourage the involvement of people in the care and work for others; (f) to relieve those in need by reason of their age, ill-health, disability, financial hardship or other disadvantage. We provide supported accommodation for 18 vulnerable adults and young people in our Crewe Road Gardens community.Food donations will be distributed to our service users free of charge.Service users are referred to us via Edinburgh City Council. We aim to use all the donated food from local supermarkets/shops to help combat food waste across the city and teach our residence an importance and value of food especially in current challenging economically times. We are very resourceful and can adjust our menu depending on current food donations. If there is surplus of veg/fruit we can make a cold pressed juice to last longer and can be kept in the fridge. Our young adults have an opportunity to take part in food preparation and improve their cooking skills which will be surely needed in their independent living as adults. Great popularity is our pizza nights which residents can you their imagination and creativity with this popular food which is great to minimize food waste. We believe that having a fully nutritious meals across day is essential to achieve their full potential and be at peak of energy:) We appreciate every donated food item or toys from local shops to cheer our residents up and express our gratitude to those who donate:) We are located in a disadvantage area of Pilton/Crewe with its own many problems and we aim to create a little oasis here for our residents to feel safe and valued. The donated food/items is essential to balance our limited budget too and allows us through money saved on shopping bill to focus on investing in them through expanding activities helping them to achieve their full potential:) To give an example: we have had a resident taken off street who was worried that coming to our premises would mean that he will eat 'junk' food:) He was surprised that he would have a regular access through food donation scheme to Pret a Manger avocado sandwiches and organic chicken from M&S!!:))) He was so happy that he will be able to eat healthy. Those little examples are inspiring our food collectors to keep going and they will gladly do this free of charge as you cannot put a price on disadvantaged residents smile while they receive lovely good donations:)