We aim to provide relief to those in food poverty while working to end food poverty in North Devon and Torridge.
by James Craigie in Bideford, Devon, United Kingdom
Our vision is to ensure that everyone in North Devon and Torridge has access to adequate nutrition, we saw 1,800 unique households across our 6 branches last year 23/24. We are currently seeing around 100 households per week amounting to 240~260 individuals, this results in us giving out over £3,000 worth of food each week. While we get great support across our community the need continues to grow each year.
This winter we want to make sure the support we give has a better, longer term impact by providing extra wrap around support from budgeting training to benefits advice with our financial inclusion workers. Northern Devon Foodbank is often the place where people come who have been failed by overstretched services and the charity sector is doing its best to fill in the gaps where society is failing. We believe that it is possible to create a society where nobody needs emergency food, however, it will no change without the compassion and commitment of everyone to make that change.
We want to pioneer a number of initiatives in the coming twelve months that embed change into our community. Working with all stakeholders we are exploring ways to build a social supermarket for North Devon and Torridge that address long term causes of food poverty include individual skills as well as societal challenges, and climate change's impact on affordability of food.
It may cost around £30 to provide the average food parcel, with on average households only needing 2.2 parcels in the year to get through their crisis. Dealing with the longer term challenges costs more initially, but we believe that it ultimately makes our society fairer, more sustainable and resilient to deal with underlying causes. Training courses can be as little as £50 per participant to arrange, while full benefit and debt advice can cost as little as £100 per household. However, the skills and information bring far greater rewards to the household and our community.
Reaching our target to raise £50,000 will mean we can train more volunteers and establish more outreach in the more rural areas of North Devon and Torridge. Torridge is the second largest land area for a District Council in England and that means the rural poor can be extremely isolated. Torridge is also in the 10 poorest Districts for average annual earnings of its residents, that means seasonal changes to employment presenting repeated benefit delays adjusting as income changes.
The 5 week wait for help for people initially applying for Universal Credit, can be devastating for a household where the primary earner has lost income due to ill health. We know the NHS is struggling and often this means waiting times are longer than we might wish. This forces households into debt and risk of homelessness even if they had a relatively high income. Households that had low incomes have almost no possibility of building up strong financial resilience.
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