FOODBANK

Please visit our blog for information on our launch, including photos, stories and insights on how the initiative is progressing.

If you would like to get involved or request more information, please use the form on the left.

What is a Foodbank?
A foodbank gives three days of nutritionally balanced (non-perishable) food and support to people experiencing emotional or financial crisis. There are already 20+ Foodbanks in London (100+ nationwide) overseen and supported by the Trussell Trust (through training and resources).

How do they work?
Food is donated by church members and local people (e.g. schools and supermarkets) and stored at the church. Volunteers sort and pack the food into food boxes. Foodbanks partner with front-line care professionals, who identify people in crisis and give them a voucher (given to them by the Foodbank team). On taking their voucher to the Foodbank centre, people receive a warm welcome, a hot drink and their food box, providing an opportunity to build relationships with those in our local community, invite them to Sunday services/events and ministries/courses, as well as put them in touch with agencies that may be able to provide further assistance.

Hunger is not just a third world problem:
Today people across the UK will struggle to feed themselves and their families. Redundancy, illness, benefit delay, domestic violence, debt, family breakdown and paying for heating during winter are just some of the reasons why people go hungry.

Westminster is the 72nd most deprived borough in the UK (out of 354). According to a recent report commissioned by Save the Children, Westminster has the fourth highest level of child poverty in Great Britain with around one in four children living in severe poverty. The polarity between rich and poor areas is striking. A boy growing up in Lancaster ward in Westminster can expect to live 11 years more than a boy growing up in Churchill ward.

Helen Longworth, the acting director of UK Poverty for Oxfam, said: "Over the past 10 years the price of food has risen by 50 per cent. We hear stories every day of families who turn to soup kitchens for something to eat. There are children with scurvy in Islington; that's a disease that should only exist in 18th-century stories."

The reasoning behind this initiative:

As a church, we take our cue from the Bible, and the words of the prophet Isaiah:

"Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter - when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? ... If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday."
(Isaiah 58:6-7, 9b-10)

We believe this is what our God asks of us: to share our food with the hungry, and this is what motivates the work of the Foodbank.

The Foodbank literature is available here: Giving Form | Shopping List