Breedon

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 fighting food waste and preventing residual food from going to landfill. The residual food is repurposed to ensure no one goes hungry”. We have a retail shop in the centre of High Wycombe. The shop is open 6 days a week. We have a warehouse on the first floor where we can sort and distribute food. This allows us to both run a shop feeding those in need and supply our partner organisations. We are collecting from leading major supermarkets within a 15-mile radius of High Wycombe. We also receive direct deliveries from manufacturers and warehouses. We are also a member of the Independent Food Aid Network (IFAN) which represents independent food banks and distributors across the UK. Our Food Hub model allows us to manage not only residual food but also ambient, chilled, and frozen food. The fact we have both a retail and wholesale distribution ability has been identified by Fare share as one of a few operations in SE England with this capability. Who do we supply? WFH supply products to people unable to access or buy food, those that cannot get Government aid or are unable to survive on the Government’s benefit payments, those who are now suffering from loss of jobs and the self-employed who cannot get benefits, those who cannot access the traditional referral foodbanks. The range of people coming to us for help is growing weekly. Considering what is happening nationally the need for our food and services will continue to grow. We have partnered with other charities and groups and we are supplying residual product to food distribution organisations across Bucks. We are also piloting supplying food to partner organisations who are using the ingredients in hot meals and school food packs. Current scale of operation We have volunteers out each day and evenings collecting residual food. We currently collect more than 250 crates a week from leading supermarkets, warehouses, and retail shops. Food that would otherwise go to landfill. We have a retail food hub open 6 days a week for 3 hours each day We are directly feeding Circa 500 people each week through our retail food hub and partners. In addition, we offer free food outside of the hub . Our wholesale operation is supplying both food parcels and crates of food to our partners. We are also now being asked to supply food to be used in the preparation of cooked meals. Our wholesale operation is growing each week as more organisations draw on our services Funding streams We receive no statutory finding from govt of Council. We rely on donations from public and by asking for a donation from users of our retail hub. We also supply food free to the charities and organisations who are taking food from us each week.

Inependent food banks, community fridges, social supermarket. We are a not for profit organisation that has been running since 2012. Currently we distribute over 40 tonnes of food a month to thousands of families. In particular the people benefiting are mostly in receipt of universal credit and D.L.A, or are currently to embarrassed to use a food bank, and ours has choice and dignity where our clients can choose what they need. Primarily we advertise as a climate change project that helps to reduce poverty by supplying food weekly in multiple areas, this reduces the stigma of use. This is to reduce food waste, help save the planet, and get children involved in organising and planning food shares. We work closely with the home educated community and many other zero waste community groups. Lots of our volunteers have long term mental health issues or are on benefits, and we are a lifeline to them both for food and the community. We have been doing humanitarian aid work in the local community and internationally for 7 years. We sent out 180 tonnes of aid in 2016/2017 to various organisations and supported many local families. In September 2019 we started The Food Share Project. A project covering Telford, Shropshire, West Midland and into Wales, to reduce food waste form the food industry, mainly supermarkets & wholesalers, and safely transport and distribute the food to the local communities via food banks. We evolved fast. When the Covid19 pandemic hit the UK and we went into lockdown in March 2020, the demand for our services of our independant foodbank increased hugely. We opened a discout pallet supermarket in September 2020 which enabled us to rescue and sell more food. The funds from our supermarket enable us to further support our independant foodbank. More recently we have reacted to the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine. To date, we have sent out 1000 pallets of aid on over 23 lorries to Poland. This has been distributed, via our partners on the ground, to the refugees in Poland and also into Ukraine itself. We run community stores nationwide.