For over 12 months North Wales Housing (NWH) has been working in partnership with FareShare North Wales to help people who are vulnerable to food hardship. Brett Sadler reports
The challenge for us as an organisation was to work out how we could work in partnership with FareShare North Wales (Fareshare NW) in distributing the vast quantities of in-date food that it has available at its disposal to some of our most vulnerable tenants. Our partner is a non-profit organisation run by recycling social enterprise Crest Co-operative that works to save in-date food from landfill by working with local and national food suppliers and re-distributes the surplus food to the North Wales community.
FareShare NW was up front with its challenge that many housing organisations had recognised the potential of such a partnership, but had been unable to actually get a scheme off the ground. Issues like the potential stigma attached to offering a scheme to tenants, as well as the practicalities of where to store food, were at the forefront of our minds. However, this was offset by the reality that there would be tenants within our homes who would benefit from such an offer and that this would only increase over time.
The outcome of this challenge was the setting up of an innovative project within our Supported Housing Conwy and Gwynedd Dispersed Services (in which we offer flats and houses to vulnerable people who have support needs). The accommodation is up to a maximum of two years with the view to moving them on to their own independent accommodation. This was the first service area chosen as by its nature the staff visit and speak regularly to their service users. This tackled one of the main issues raised at the beginning – whether such a scheme would affect the ongoing relationship with our tenants. The Supported Housing Dispersed staff visited FareShare NW and agreed a standard ‘pack’ of food and from the March 2013 fortnightly deliveries began to the Conwy and Gwynedd NWH offices.
We deliberately kept the project as simple as possible, to ensure that we could it up and running quickly. The way the project works is that FareShare NW provides food boxes to us at a donation of £5+VAT and we then ask the end recipients for a donation towards the food box cost. The food boxes themselves contain over £20 of food, including foods like pasta, cereals and cooking sauces.
Project results
We have been extremely pleased with the project results to date. We\’ve distributed around 500 food boxes to some of our most vulnerable tenants, equating to nearly five tonnes of food being saved from landfill and redistributed to tenants. This translates to over £10,000 worth of food being delivered, at a cost to NWH of £3,000, with the offset of donations received from tenants who have received the food of over £1,500. We\’ve had to be flexible in how we\’ve stored the food and we\’ve used different methods to raise awareness and distribute it.
Feedback from the staff has been very positive and the feedback from the recipients has really been amazing, as in the following comments: \’It costs me £6.50 to get on a bus and go shopping to the nearest cheap supermarket. That money is now spent on buying basic stock from the FareShare Scheme and then I pick up my meat and veg from my local shop. I had been struggling to keep up with my gas and electric arrears and the money I now save goes towards paying this debt. Any spare food I have left before my next order I like to share with other tenants less fortunate than me in our block.\’
\’I suffer from agoraphobia and also struggle with mobility. Rather than having to get my mother to either shop for me or take me shopping once a week, I can now buy a lot of my stock direct through the FareShare Scheme.\’
Not that we are resting on our laurels. Some of the food boxes have been distributed to tenants outside of supported housing, which has been due to a combination of word of mouth staff awareness. The next stage is to open the project out to all of our tenants within the borough of Conwy. We\’re planning on doing this through our website, so that our tenants can also order their food online.
Brett Sadler is assistant director – neighbourhoods at North Wales Housing