INTO OUR OWN HANDS Lily Watts
INTO OUR OWN HANDS Lily Watts
‘The economic crisis caused by the impact of Covid-19 has continued to drive a sustained surge in the need for food banks in the United Kingdom. New figures from the Trussell Trust show that there was an 89% increase in need, compared to the same period last year.’ - Trussell Trust Over the space of the past three months, I have been documenting a range of Cardiff-based community food initiatives and their volunteers, who are taking matters into their own hands and fighting food poverty and insecurity within their local communities.
AM Jenny Rathbone “The dedication that Al-Ikhlas has shown to its local community is extraordinary. For over a year they have been organising the distribution of food parcels to hungry families, at considerable risk to their own personal safety in the middle of the Covid pandemic. I salute them from the bottom of my heart.” Jenny works closely with the centre and regularly donates to the foodbank.
Food For Life “We’ve been running Food For Life for over 20 years in Wales, but last March at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, we really took off. Everything was uncertain for everyone, and we decided rather than thinking about how we’re going to survive ourselves, why not give back to the community. So, we began taking meals door to door. We started doing about 20, then 30, then 40, 50 meals a day. When we got up to 100 meals a day, we were really pleased with ourselves ... at its peak we were doing 1000 meals a day. Now we’re doing about 1500 a week, so we’ve levelled out to a sustainable level.
Food For Life is run by Tŷ Krishna Cymru which is the yoga meditation centre in Cardiff Bay. A lot of people need a bit of love in their lives and a lot of people are struggling to just feed themselves with proper, home cooked, nourishing food. We help a wide range of people from different areas of society that are in need. We believe in reaching out to help people, not just to be fed, but also inspiring them to make positive changes in their lives by showing a bit of human touch and showing a bit of love and care.” - Vamśī-vilāsi Dāsa
Evie Thomson / Gopī-gītā
Vamśī-vilāsi Dāsa
Steve Khaireh, Butetown Community Food Project “I am Steve Khaireh and I’m a community worker for an organization called Horn Development Association. I’ve been a community worker for over 30 years, working with the council, and I now work in the voluntary sector. This project is quite a unique project, we set it up at the start of the lockdown in March. I was just delivering food and going shopping for people, collecting prescriptions, and realized the community centre was closed, so I contacted the management committee and asked if there was something I could do for the people and the building and it went from there. This is six charities that have all come together; Horn Development Association, Grangetown Boys and Girls Club, Henna Foundation, Hayaat Women Trust, Women
Connect First and Butetown Community Centre, and I’m the coordinator. It’s been crazy really in two ways for me. On a personal level, I was losing my faith in humanity, you know? I’m not happy with the way that some of the decisions have been made and I’m losing that faith in people only interested in themselves. But since Covid-19, the amount of people who’ve come together, people from as far as Bridgend, who have turned up and have come here and offered their help has restored my faith in humanity. On a professional level, it’s the amount of people who desperately have no funds or no means to look after themselves that is quite shocking. Something needed to be done to help and that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Sophie Jenkins-Jones “I’ve enjoyed eating at Atma over the years and I followed them on Facebook; so, when I saw the appeal that they were looking for people, just to prepare vegetables to help support a food relief programme, which is Food For Life. I just thought well that’s something I would really like to do. I knew the location that they were using, and I like their philosophy, so I went along, and it just grew from there. Clearly there’s a need for the work that they are doing, and a lot
of the recipients have various vulnerabilities, it’s not just poverty; It might be mental health, or there might be health worries. I think this has been a time where people have realised that there are a massive number of invisible people, of all ages, who are struggling. So, to reach out and help, why would you not want to do that?” Sophie has been a member of the Food For Life team since March 2020. Atma is also ran by Tŷ Krishna.
Sam Bird, Morrisons Community Champion
Shaun Lane, Wyndham Pantry “We started a project a couple of years ago called ‘We Can Work It Out’ and it was part of the South Riverside Community Development Centre, the organisation that I’m working for now, that the food project comes under and three other partner organisations in Cardiff and essentially, it was looking at poverty amongst refugees and asylum seekers. There’s a lot of people who are currently working, but still experiencing poverty, due to a number of factors like; zero hour contracts or low wages, just having a large family, health costs or some kind of disability that requires more ... it can really leave families still struggling to make ends meet, despite being in full time work. So, it was looking at what the main causes of that are and from that, to go through and look at solutions that can help it. This project grew out of ‘We Can Work It Out’, into its own thing. So, we started in April 2020, and we accelerated the start-up as lockdown came in and we saw a need to be able to provide food for the community. It is based on the pantry model; the idea is that people contribute
roughly around five pounds each week and they come and are able to pick the items they want and can make their own bag selection, rather than just getting an assortment as you would from a food bank - where you’ve also got to jump through all these hoops and checks that really takes the dignity out of it. We have just over 100 households that we’re currently supporting, and if you look at it, the average household could be four or five people, including kids. So, each week it’s potentially hundreds of people that we’re helping. I think that this is such an important thing because it brings the community together in more ways than just food. We’ve got all of the volunteers that help with the project and they absolutely make it possible. If I wasn’t here, it would still be able to run, but if the volunteers left, we would be screwed. They are what make these kinds of projects run. It brings the community together and there will be some things
that the volunteers will tell me, like what is more culturally relevant food-wise, certain things that we need to do and even just the way that we pack the bags. Day by day, you get these little snippets of people’s lives and across time, it’s just really nice because even though you’re giving food in this relationship of service provider and service user, it levels it out a little bit more. You share bits of your own life and it makes it into something that is a really positive experience. I think it’s important to keep a positive atmosphere here, particularly when something is as fundamental as being able to afford food. I can see it being a big deal to people. People being able to come and express the need for help with buying food and there’s no ... we don’t see shame with people - they hang around and have a chat, they don’t mind showing their faces here which is really important. You don’t want to be adding on extra stress or extra worry onto people because they can’t afford food.”
“Food poverty is a complex issue, because it does tie into families and households who are working and who are struggling to make ends meet. All the time, people we see have got to make a decision between, heating, clothing their kids or buying food. There’s also a lot tied into refugees and asylum seekers and their experience of work. Which is that they often get the low-quality jobs, with low pay and intermittent work. We see a lot of people in rubbish situations just because they don’t have a firm knowledge of employment rights or workplace discrimination. The asylum seekers or refugees would be given the worst jobs, or places to work at, because they don’t have the language skills to challenge or question it. A lot of them are on the back foot, feeling that their circumstances are a bit tentative and that they would jeopardise their claim or their right to stay in the country if they challenge an employer because they’ve been discriminated against. There’s a lot of stuff that is just let to ride.” - Shaun Lane
Pictured on the left is Neil Patel, founder of The Vegeterian Food Studio who regularly helps the Food For Life team with recipies.
Finlay Crawford
Faith Mbayiwa, Wyndham Pantry “I started volunteering here because I’m a student at Cardiff Met - studying Youth and Community work. I’ve been volunteering at Wyndham Pantry since November 2020. It is important what we are doing because when you do community work, you’re supporting people in the community. Though I am mainly concerned about young people and families, the more you volunteer and the more you get in touch with people, the more you become confident in being able to communicate with others, and the more you become to know your surroundings and once you know this, it’s easy to engage in any way in the community and engage in conversation with people that are in the community. I need to say that this is a lovely place and I’m happy to work here because everybody works
together in a team and that is very important. I’m happy when we do deliveries, we get to meet people in their homes. Sometimes we can share stories and it is pleasing to hear about people stories. One time, I went and they were talking about how they were given some food that they didn’t want. So, we brung that food here, prepared the recipe and ingredients for the young people and we made some food bags for the youth centre so that they could make some soup. If I didn’t talk to that person, they’d just say chuck it in the bin. So, we say give it to us, then we can make soup. That’s how we came to have this service where we are making and delivering their meals. So, I’m happy that I’ve managed to have a grasp on loads of things that are happening in the Riverside community, and give something back.”
Hassan Hammouda, Al-Ikhlas
Kense Hayan, Wyndham Pantry
Al-Ikhlas Foodbank “We are a charitable organisation called the Al-Ikhlas Centre, based in Adamsdown. The centre has been established since 2012. Since then, we have been running different types of services. The evolution of the foodbank idea came from a group consultation with the community, where we asked them what sort of service they would like to see within the community. We had many ideas - we had the foodbank idea, sewing classes for women, a youth club and education and interpretation classes for refugees and asylum seekers. The people then prioritised these ideas and they thought that the foodbank is well needed in the community, and this was just before the first lockdown happened. We were eventually directed to an organisation called FareShare Cymru. We got in touch with them, we had a meeting, and then they started to introduce us with these big supermarkets - Tesco’s, Lidl, Aldi and Morrison’s. So, when they linked us with these organisations, we started working with them and we built a relationship with them. When lockdown
kicked in, the need for the foodbank was even greater, it was in its highest demand, so we then started to introduce deliveries to people’s homes, especially for the vulnerable, for those shielding, the people with underlying health conditions and for the ones who are self-isolating. We started to also advertise the need for support within the local communities, and then we recieved some funding from various organisations. They gave us a very strong ground to stand on in order to continue providing this service. In June last year, we distributed around 200/250 food parcels a week, and this was enormous for us. At the same time, it is very honourable for us to save and help the community. We also built a relationship with Jenny Rathbone, a Welsh Assembly member. She then from her side, started to do fundraising for us and she then spoke to organisations who donate, particularly fruits and vegetables, to us regularly.
the start of the initiative, we never thought that we would last and never thought that there will be as great of a need for a foodbank in this community, but by looking at it now and where we are now, I think we are thankful that we had come up with this initiative and the community is benefiting from it a lot and the amount of people who have benefited from the food bank is enormous. We now distribute an average of 150 parcels each Tuesday, excluding the deliveries and the odd person that comes to the centre outside of the foodbank hours. We are committed here to continue this service, and we hope that we will continue working closely with the organisations and with our partners. I think this initiative is very successful and we give our gratitude to those who have supported this, and hopefully we will continue to provide this service to the community.”
I’ll say that we are very well established, although we are only on our second year. When we look back at - Imam Ahmed Ali
Saeed Bawazeer, Hassan Lamsalah and Elsamani Mohamed
“We have to do something because we are part of the community and that’s why we have to help.” - Saeed Bawazeer
Maurice Bertram is a recipient of the meals from Food For Life.
Student Food Bank Collection “We basically just thought of this idea because we found it quite disappointing that the government was promising children and families 30 pound food meal plans and it ended up only being no more than 10 pounds. We just thought that it was really disappointing, so we thought we’d come together as students and make that difference and the response has been amazing. It’s been really good, we’ve got a ridiculous amount of food already and we’re really excited for donations and money as well - we’ve set up a PayPal pool and that’s turned out really well, so, whatever we have here we also could do this 10 times over with the money we’ve got and we’re just hoping to help out.
Being students of this city as well, sometimes people see students as people who are not really doing much for the local community, so we’re trying to change that a little bit. All the food that we get here is going to Trussell Trust, which is a food bank and they’re really thankful for the support. This is our second collection and hopefully this is going to be a monthly thing.” - Kate Marks
Md. Mashahidur Rahman, Wyndham Pantry
“This place is a godsend, it really is. I don’t know what I’d do without the help from these guys.”
Harry Silkstone