Co-operating to Tackle Food Poverty during the School Holidays
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Published 7 Sep 2021 in Communities
With many children returning to school this week, over the Summer, our Society partnered with three local councils to help feed more than 7,000 children over the Summer holidays as part of our mission to tackle food poverty.
As part of the Government Holidays activities and Food programme (HAF), the mission was to create meal boxes to feed a family of four for up to four nights and deliver them to selected homes, holiday clubs and local libraries across our local communities on a weekly basis. All designed in partnership with a qualified nutritionist and our very own in-store chef Judy Cheyne, our teams also developed recipe cards and videos that enabled the children to learn and follow from home.
In total, we helped to deliver 17,600 meals to over 2,500 families, which has continued to make a real difference to everyone involved. A big thank you to all the colleagues who worked tirelessly to organise and deliver the meals to over 2,500 families. Without you, it wouldn’t have been possible to help so many in our local communities.
We’ve already had some fantastic feedback from the three councils involved (Dudley CVS and MBC, Walsall and Shropshire Councils) where all three have stated they want to organise some Christmas holiday support similar to the one over the Summer. Fantastic news! 😊 Keep an eye for that later this year.
“I would like to offer a huge thanks to the people that made this happen; Judy who devised some amazing and healthy recipes and for doing the filming that the children could cook along to, Peter, Tash and the Churchstoke team who worked tirelessly to organise and deliver all the meals and to Donna, Mark and Olly who managed to organise the delivery of stock. A formidable task during a time when we had stock availability issues since the beginning of the year.”
Matt Windridge, Head of Food Markets Supermarkets and Post Office Operation
Food justice is an ever-increasing topic and over the last few years, we have helped support many initiatives like the Food Bank Fund by raising more than £50,000 during the pandemic as well as joining forces with fellow co-op’s to become a member of the Marcus Rashford’s Child Food Poverty Taskforce. All while we continue to provide essential support to Food banks that provide for our local communities.