Army of volunteers helping to feed the poorest families
FOOD AID SCHEME HAS GROWN FROM TWO TO 200 HELPERS
A WEST London woman’s innovative grassroots food aid scheme has grown from two volunteers at the beginning of the pandemic to nearly 200 one year on.
Margaret Blankson, a 59-year-old management consultant from Shepherd’s Bush, founded Foodbank Doorsteppers at the beginning of lockdown, in response to the urgent need for food aid in her community.
Born and raised in Keith Grove, Margaret worked in a number of local authority roles in west London – including education, community engagement and equality – before establishing the food aid scheme.
This week will mark the one-year anniversary of the project, which Margaret set up in March 2020 using the hyperlocal social networking website Nextdoor – just two weeks before losing her mum to Covid-19.
“I started it a couple of weeks before she died,” said Margaret, describing how her mum would have been “so proud” of what they have achieved.
“She always said you have got to do something, you can’t just sit there,” said Margaret.
Margaret said during the first lockdown the demand for Government food support was so high the Government website crashed.
She said: “I thought, there’s no way the Government can organise this in any sensible fashion.”
Margaret rang the local authority to see what support she could offer, but that “went nowhere” – so she decided to take matters into her own hands.
She went onto Nextdoor to start networking, and over the following six weeks Foodbank Doorsteppers was established.
The scheme, which now has 187 volunteers, uses an innovative method to provide rapid and effective food aid for residents in Hammersmith and Fulham.
Three times a week, volunteers start by leafletting houses to request bags of food donations, then drive round collecting the bags a short while later, before taking them to a local food bank for redistribution.
Margaret said it is “like an Easter egg hunt” looking for people who will donate a bag.
“It works because people come together and give up their time and their energy and their ideas,” she said.
The scheme has made such an impression that a number of local figures joined them for their oneyear-anniversary collection on Friday March 19, including Mayor of Hammersmith and Fulham PJ Murphy, Labour MP Andy Slaughter and local footballer Dominic Ball.
The 25-year-old Queens Park Rangers midfielder said: “I saw QPR in the Community Trust tweeting about how the food bank went from supplying 100 families a week to 100 families a day.”
Dominic said the figure was “shocking” and he decided he wanted to help “in any way I could”.
He added that as a well-known football club it is “the least we can do”.
Andy Slaughter, Labour MP for Hammersmith and Fulham, described how statutory services in the borough had “done a really good job” but that volunteers were an absolute necessity “in a crisis like this”.
Mr Slaughter said prior to the pandemic Hammersmith and Fulham already had the biggest food bank in the country and now there are “hundreds of thousands” of people who need help in the borough, a reality he described as “tragic”.
“What has been really good here is you have people like Margaret and her team who give the infrastructure,” he said, calling it a “really good thing” that people were willing to give up their own time to provide the service.
However, Mr Slaughter added that both he and the volunteers agree the service should not have to exist.
“We wish it didn’t have to be done,” he said, adding that he thinks the service will sadly be necessary for “a long time”.
Mr Slaughter said: “We thought up until 10 years ago we lived in a country that could provide for people in need, then we found that we couldn’t anymore – and that’s been a big wake-up call.
“We have exposed a lot of need in the community that was behind closed doors, a lot of people we didn’t know about.
“A lot of the skills and the networks developed here will be necessary until we have a proper welfare state.”
PJ Murphy, Mayor of Hammersmith and Fulham, said it was “heartbreaking” that so many people need the service – including an increasing number of people who are employed yet still did not have enough money to feed their families.
“Austerity has really thrashed people into the ground,” said Mr Murphy, adding: “How can it be that one of the wealthiest boroughs, in one of the wealthiest areas in the world, doesn’t have enough food?”
“It’s appalling,” he said, and described the increasing need for food aid as “an absolute abdication of responsibility of our government”.
He added: “I think the first thing is that you have to make sure people are paid a proper wage for doing a proper job and people aren’t being subsidised by the state.
“Then that people who are receiving benefits are getting a proper amount to live a proper life.”
He said the extra £20 per week of Universal Credit allowance announced by Rishi Sunak in his budget earlier this month “has been good” but said it was “not enough”.
Mr Murphy said the problem of affordable housing needed to be addressed first in order to tackle the problem of food poverty.
“People can’t afford to buy, they can’t afford to rent, and they can’t afford to eat,” he said, adding: “What sort of country is that?”