Hope Kete providing food and new Opportunities
Group changing lives of volunteers and community
Afew years ago, Levin woman Tania Turipa was struggling as a solo mother of six children and turned to Te Awahou Kai in Foxton for help with feeding her family.
Eventually Tania began helping out with food parcel creation and distribution — all the while thinking to herself something similar needed to be set up closer to home.
Te Awahou Kai organiser Linda Lake mentioned to Tania that Rebecca Culver, founder of food rescue organisation Just Zilch in Palmerston North, was keen to support a community food source for Levin too.
“This was really going out of my comfort zone,” said Tania. “I was very shy and withdrawn at the time . . . the idea of trying to set up a business . . . asking people for help . . . terrified me.”
In early 2020, Tania started planning how to set up a Levin-based food rescue operation, but when the country went into lockdown in March, plans for Hope Kete had to be put on hold.
Tania began to wonder if she should start job-hunting while she waited to get the business started.
“Then out of the blue a local business contacted us to say they were going to supply [us with] 60kg of mince every week for the rest of the year,” Tania said.
With the rest of the food being supplied by Just Zilch and
Paraparaumu-based Kaibosh, Hope Kete began business from Hope Church’s community cafe in Kent St on Wednesday, August 19.
On the first day of operation, 63 people turned up, with 748 items of food being counted and handed out by volunteers.
Leon Wickliffe was one of the original volunteers who helped that day, and is still turning up every week to lend a hand.
Arriving in Levin in late 2019, Leon was living on the streets and doing drugs.
He was a regular at Legacy
Church’s weekly community meal Just Hope.
“One day I ended up in the kitchen helping prep the food, then I started going to the church services. Now I’ve been clean for 18 months and I volunteer [at Hope Kete] to give back to the community that saved me.”
Another volunteer is James Darwin, a local who originally came to the Hope Centre for the free meals, like Leon.
When James first asked if he could help at Hope Kete, he was so wasted that Tania was really hesitant to let him.
“She told me if I got straight I could help,” said James, “and I’ve been sober for six months now. Being part of [Hope Kete] has definitely helped with my journey.”
Tania was introduced to Hope Church member Karen Morley, who took on the administration duties for
Hope Kete, and in less than two years sourced funding for three paid roles within the organisation, including her own.
Another of the funded positions was the manager role, which Tania had been doing for over a year on a volunteer basis. With funding received from MSD in October last year, Tania was able to come off her benefit.
Charlotte Birkett’s role with Hope Kete is also funded, although she originally started out standing in line on Wednesdays, with her foster daughter, waiting for food assistance.
“My daughter really wanted to help give out food to the people,” said Charlotte, “so we’d come along most weeks, get our food, and then she’d help out.”
Tania eventually encouraged Charlotte to volunteer as well, and then earlier this year funding whiz Karen sourced a contract from MSD for Hope Kete to be the Horowhenua hub for creating and delivering care parcels for locals isolating with Covid.
Charlotte has had 30 hours of paid work a week since March with this role, which will probably carry on for the rest of the year, and has been clean for 11 months.
The number of people seeking food assistance dropped slightly in the early part of 2021, but shot back up during the second lockdown.
“We made up 150 parcels when we reopened during the second week of level 3 [early September],” said Tania, “all were given out and we nearly wiped out the entire store room.”
Demand has not really decreased since: 133 people came through the doors over three hours on the first Wednesday in May, and more than 2700kg of food was given out that week through the “store”, the isolation food parcels and outreach deliveries in Foxton, Shannon and Levin.
Hope Kete has 12 volunteers helping with deliveries on Mondays and Tuesdays and distribution through the “store” on Wednesdays.
The group receives donations of meat and vegetables from the community, but the majority of the food comes from other NZ Food Network partners like Just Zilch and Kaibosh, as well as Labelle Food and Manawatu Fruit Harvest.
Tania’s short-term goal is to find a sponsor to get the delivery vans signwritten and to source more volunteer drivers/helpers for the deliveries.
Her long-term goals are to obtain a bigger space in the centre of town and offer a range of free products beyond grocery items.
If you’re interested in knowing more about what Hope Kete does and how you can help, check out the Facebook page Hope Kete — Levin Free Food Store or email karen@hopelevin.org. nz