Tesco teaming up with Hull chapel to fight food poverty
AMAZING GRACE VOLUNTEERS REDISTRIBUTE FOOD PARCELS
THE Amazing Grace Chapel in Hull is helping to tackle food poverty in the city by distributing parcels of donated provisions and serving meals made from items left over from its food collections.
With the support of Tesco’s Bags of Help grants and the Community Food Connection Scheme, run in partnership with food charity Fareshare, the church has been assisting even more people with little or no income because of the pandemic.
Volunteers from the Beverley Road church, launched in 2005, collect surplus food from three Tesco stores across Hull each week, the donations helping to fuel its food bank service.
It also runs a Saturday soup kitchen so that people in the community can enjoy a freshly prepared meal, made from food items not collected from the food bank earlier in the week.
Alongside the food donations from the supermarket, the group has also recently benefitted from Tesco’s Bags of Help Covid-19 Communities Fund – a grant provided to organisations that have required additional funding due to coronavirus.
Esther Aleshinloye, assistant parish pastor of the Amazing Grace Chapel, said the funding had been used as a buffer to supplement the pre-existing food services.
“We are extremely grateful to Tesco for the food donations and the Bags of Help grant, both of which have heavily supported the group in recent times,” she said.
“The surplus food is used throughout the week at the food bank and soup kitchen, while the grant has been applied to fill in the gaps of high-demand foodstuffs that may not have been included in the surplus food donation that week.”
Every Tuesday and Thursday, community members are invited to book an allocated slot to visit the church’s food bank, where the surplus food is laid out on tables.
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Each week, the church distributes approximately 150 parcels to those in food poverty in the community. ensures to only that take
Throughout the pandemic, more members of the community than ever have required the essential services provided at the church.
To provide a safer option for those relying on the weekly meals service, the soup kitchen now serves freshly prepared sandwiches and lunches that can be collected and eaten elsewhere.
Claire de Silva, head of community at Tesco, said: “We know that the Community Food Connection Scheme is making a real difference to groups like the Amazing Grace Chapel by providing a little bit of extra help in the shape of surplus food from our stores.
“This is the biggest supermarket food redistribution scheme in the UK, and we know there are more groups that could receive food for the work they carry out, so I would encourage any group that thinks it could benefit to contact Fareshare, so we can help even more good causes.”
Lindsay Boswell, chief executive at Fareshare, said: “We are incredibly thankful to Tesco for its continued support of Fareshare.
“We work with a number of charities and community groups providing essential support to their local communities, and receiving a steady stream of food helps them to feed those who need it most.”
Charities and community groups interested in signing up for regular food donations through Tesco can sign up at www.fareshare.org.uk