Gatis Community Space has been set up and run by a team of dedicated volunteers from the local area. They saw an opportunity when the centre, which had originally been an adventure playground, was shut down in a round of local government funding cuts. Over the past five years they have turned the centre into a thriving community hub that supports the local community and offers a wide range of activities, sessions and homes for local groups. In addition the team are working hard to improve both the look and the feel of the building, community garden, play equipment and wider grounds.
One of our key projects is the Real Junk Food Project Wolverhampton where we take in donations of food that would have ended up in landfill and redistribute them to the local community on a pay as you feel basis, which can be time or money. We have already saved 3 tons of food from being thrown away and need support to help to save, store and distribute the food and it to people in need of support.
Our goal with this project is to improve and expand on these activities and are crowdfunding to put some extra support in place. In short the money we are raising will be spent on:
- Purchasing a temperature controlled trailer - this will allow us to expand the types of food donation we can take in and redistribute.
- Developing training around food poverty and create simple cooking workshops.
- Developing a system of food buddies - champion volunteers based locally who can help find those people that need support and help make sure locally grown food in gardens, allotments and on fruit trees etc is harvested and used locally.
We love to dream big and see where we end up - its done us well so far, from a small band of volunteers back in 2015 to last year where we received the Queens Award for Voluntary Service for all the work we do in our community, with around 100 active volunteers on our books at any one time across our different projects.
Anything you are able to donate to this cause will go towards supporting the people of wolverhampton and allow us to tackle food waste and food poverty at the same time.
Here is a short video of one of our volunteers who supports all our food projects: