Kathryn finds happiness in life more grounded
FROM FLYING WITH BA TO HELPING FEED THE HUNGRY WITH AMAZING CITY HARVEST CHARITY
NESTLED on a quiet industrial estate in Acton, music booms out of one unassuming-looking warehouse unit where a group of volunteers and staff are busily doing amazing things.
Kathryn Marshall, City Harvest’s volunteer engagement manager, took up the role after being furloughed from her job as an air stewardess.
With striking white-and-green branding, unit eight is home to City Harvest, a quite incredible food distribution charity delivering essentials to up to 350 charities each week across the capital.
Originally, charity founder Laura Winningham, who lives locally, “started with one van” to collect leftover food from supermarkets in 2008, but it has since grown into a vital lifeline for huge numbers of people.
Incredibly, staff here delivered eight million meals to Londoners last year alone.
There’s a mood of hope and optimism at the warehouse which is fresh with art splashed on its walls by talented London artists. Volunteers and staff are made to feel “part of the family” with a tuckshop of foody items for them to choose from.
The friendly community spirit is catching. Volunteers on the books are nearing 3,000 with an influx of “talented” people economically hit by lockdowns. Some volunteers, who joined the ranks during periods of furlough or unemployment due to the Covid crisis, have since been taken on as paid staff. Kathryn Marshall is one of them.
The 26-year-old has been on furlough for her job as cabin crew for British Airways since the start of the pandemic when she described her “whole world was turned upside down”. The languages graduate from the Wirral began jetting all over the world with BA after finishing her degree in Leeds, and was based at Hounslow, Uxbridge, and now Ealing Common to be close to Heathrow airport for work. But the experience of uncertainty around BA’s ‘fire and rehire’ scheme, Kathryn recalled as “really ungrounding” in not knowing whether she was going to have a job, take leave, or be able to pay her rent. She added: “I quickly realised in quite an emotional way I didn’t have a support network down here...I lasted a month at home doing everything everyone else was doing making banana bread, reading books and thought I have got to do something, I have got to volunteer.”
She started volunteering at City Harvest multiple times a week and found a “little piece of sanity” in familiar faces who cared about what was happening in each others’ lives.
In the summer months, she was offered a paid position as the team expanded.
“It’s just been such a rewarding experience,” she said. “People don’t just come here to give their time, they come here because it’s a sense of community, it can sometimes be someone’s family.”
Comparing her much-loved new job to the old, she added: “The job with BA, it’s not a job, it’s a lifestyle... It’s a different team every day, it gives you very little opportunity to connect with people on a long-term basis whereas here, I have found good friendship in my team.
“It’s just been such a rewarding experience. People don’t just come here to give their time, they come here because it’s a sense of community, it can sometimes be someone’s family.”
Touring around the site with huge stacks of fresh food, tins and more, community impact manager Andrew Mcleay, explained: “A lot of people working here are on the breadline, like they have lost their jobs, this is a really good way to be able to help them.”
As one of the newer members to the team, joining in January after working at Ealing Soup Kitchen, Andrew says the staff numbers have doubled since the pandemic rising to 50.
Volunteer and staff backgrounds are also wide-ranging from people who have experienced homelessness to those living in wealthy Kensington.
Office manager Steve Brand is another colleague who nine months ago was working in corporate events. As the crisis struck the 41-year-old remembers watching his computer screen with bookings cancelling and “disappeared in the space of an hour”.
While he was looking forward to a career break on furlough for the first time in his life, he got called in by a friend to help volunteer at the charity in need of extra hands.
“I really loved it, great atmosphere, I came back and the next day and the next, [then told] we are looking for an office manager and the rest is history,” he said.
During the pandemic, the charity has received a hike in donations from restaurants who have been forced to close, and high-profile supporters include Nandos to Marks & Spencers to the Chelsea Flower Show.
Andrew, who builds up relationships with the charities City Harvest serve, says many causes have started up to due to Covid, such as residents’ associations and Covid mutual aid groups.
In Andrew’s former job at Ealing Soup Kitchen, he remembers being a recipient of City Harvest for extra supplies, but only saw the charity as a “small part” when they showed up to drop off food packages for five minutes.
He said: “I never realised... how organised it is, all the food, it’s quite crazy to see the level of organisation it needs to run and the speed that is needed.”
In 2019, the charity recorded a distribution of four million meals in the year across London, and is on track to deliver one million meals a month for 2021.
But Steve admits “it’s not all rainbows” in managing the vast operation of feeding London, and he has long been lobbying the Mayor of London and Transport for London for more travel exemptions to cut down their costs of distributing supplies.