School launches food project

A NEW food share project has launched at a South Wales school which aims to help parents who are struggling to make ends meet at home.

The project at Ogmore Vale Primary School sees bags of food distributed to parents for a small fee.

Working in partnership with nonprofit organisation FareShare, they also hope to invite parents in for cooking classes with each bag of food as well as a range of agencies to offer debt and housing advice to try to get to the root of the problems some families are facing.

The bags contain a variety of products sourced from supermarkets and restaurants that would otherwise end up in landfill including fresh and ambient/long-life products. In addition, a member of staff uses the contents from one of the bags to cook from, making as many meals as possible to show just how much can be prepared.

Each wek, up to 200kg of food is collected from a distribution centre in Aberkenfig with school staff volunteering each week to pack the bags. Parents can then pre-order and collect the bags for just £3 the next day.

Ogmore Vale Primary School’s Susanne Roderick, who set up the project, said: “We were beginning to hear more and more from parents who were struggling to make ends meet at home. This was very worrying and we looked into providing some sort of food support as a school.

“We did some research and found FareShare online and, as an ecoschool, we were very keen to work with them. Within a couple of weeks, we were receiving deliveries of 100kg and later 200kg of food weekly. 200kg of food provides 24 large bags of food for our families.”