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Maidenhead Foodbank

Foodshare is a Registered Charity with a simple charitable objective: to help people in and around Maidenhead who are, for whatever reason, unable to feed themselves and their families properly.

Our primary focus is on providing nutritious food, including fresh food, fruit & vegetables.  We aim to provide a minimum of 3 days of food, more if we have the stock.   We accommodate as far as we can particular dietary requirements (for example, vegetarian, gluten-free, Halal etc).

Foodshare Referrer

People are usually referred to the food bank by organisations and individuals who know something of the person’s situation and can determine if they are in need of food support.  We have a network of around 80 referring agencies - all the professional social support services, NHS units, RBWM, Citizens Advice, many schools and some churches, GPs and other local support charities. 

We help people who are in a state of food insecurity, meaning they don’t know if they will have enough food for the week (or even the day in more extreme circumstances).  Typically, that is a crisis resulting from loss of employment, benefits delays/sanctions, illness and chronic health conditions, sudden large debt etc.  We see an increasing number of people who are actually in work but simply do not have enough income, particularly if self-employed or on zero-hours contracts.  The majority of people are helped for a short term – for a month or two – until their crisis has eased.                          

Homeless and Rough Sleeper Projects

Foodshare also helps the street homeless and people accommodated in shelters and hostels, either directly or by working in partnership with support organisations, notably Windsor Homeless Project and Look Ahead.      

Holiday Hunger Project

The other significant category of support is school children; the charity supplies extra provisions for breakfast clubs at several schools, so no child has to start the school day hungry.  During the school breaks we run our Holiday Hunger project, providing free lunches and distributing ready meals to help families who struggle with the extra cost of meals when their children are not being fed at school.         

Pandemic Adjustments

Prior to the current public health crisis, the Foodshare charity was helping typically around 300 people each week. That number rose dramatically from late March through April, peaking at over 800 people each week through May.   That placed several huge challenges on us in terms of resources (food stocks, funds and volunteers).  Happily, a lot of people stepped forward to help, particularly with making home deliveries, and the charity was fortunate to receive some extra funds.       

Second Foodbank

The most pressing issue soon became physical space; the food bank was simply too small to hold sufficient food stocks, and moreover, constrained the safe working of the volunteers.  Consequently, we opened a 2nd much larger food bank (within 2 days!)  to be able to cope with the level of demand and have the space to take in, sort and store more food stocks, and to prepare for around 250 deliveries / collections each week.   Volunteers have room to spread out for the safe performance of sorting and packing activities, and similarly customers can be accommodated with one-direction walkways and necessary social distancing.

Moving into our second Foodbank

Initially it was very difficult to make bulk purchases.   Foodshare is concerned to give the people we help a balanced and nutritious diet (during ‘normal’ times, almost all the money spent by the charity has been to purchase fresh food), so we ramped up a volunteer activity of making ready meals.  A small army of home cooks each purchased the necessary ingredients (paid for by Foodshare) and prepared containers on a grand scale.  

Donations

Historically the charity has relied on donations of food items from the public, mainly via donation baskets in supermarkets, as its main source of food.  But with the pandemic, there was a sharp drop in supermarket visits, consequently impacting donations, while meanwhile, we had a huge surge in demand.  Consequently, the charity has been spending around £1500 each week to purchase food (approximately 3 times as much as we used to spend).       

Our Local Community

Neighbourhoods stepped up to help us too, with food donation points set up in many streets.  The terrific response to this initiative offset the reduction we had seen in shopper donations at supermarkets.

We extended our reach during the pandemic by working with some local schools to distribute food bags to people they identified as being in need of food support, especially while their children were not receiving free school meals.    The charity’s policy of referrals to the food bank was relaxed, permitting some people to contact us directly for help initially.    We also made connections with some neighbourhood support groups, including Cookham SOS and Cox Green SOS; they helped us to reach more people, and also provided another source of food donation.

  

Our Local Community

The numbers of people helped each week has reduced from the peak demand experienced through May and into June but is still running well ahead of the pre-pandemic level.   We expect that to continue, and in fact to rise steadily as the economic effects of the crisis start to bite (it is also possible that a sudden surge in demand for help will occur again if there is a 2nd wave of the virus spreading).

Prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we would have doubted our ability to help people on a scale almost 3 times greater than normal operation.    But we did that, thanks to a corresponding surge in good will around the town, in the form of many new volunteers and donations, and several key individuals whose dedication and efforts have been simply remarkable.

  

I'd like to take this opportunity to say a very big thank you to you and the team at Maidenhead Foodshare. 

Your dedication, hard work and generosity to help local families is overwhelming and from the bottom of my heart and the team at Riverside we are extremely grateful. 

You have been incredible during this very difficult time. If there is anything that we can support, you with as a school please let me know. 

Thank you for everything that you have done, take care and hopefully see you soon. 

Lauren Porter

Deputy Headteacher & Designated Safeguarding Lead 

Riverside Primary School and Nursery

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Contact 

Trustee Lester Tanner

07570 811 829

FoodShare.Today

Foodshare Charity Number 1142868

Contact:

Trustee Debbie Gee

07782 345 935