Make Lunch
Make Lunch,
in normal years, runs holiday clubs for primary school aged children and their families, providing enrichment activities and hot, nutritious meals in two locations of the city in each week of the school holidays. In 2020 these activities were significantly curtailed by Covid-19, and in fact we were only able to run one face-toface session in February. Early in lockdown, we started to offer support directly to a number of our Make Lunch families who had indicated they were struggling financially, with that impacting on their ability to provide enough food for their families. When the scale of the pandemic, and it’s likely impact and timeframe, became clear, we consulted with our families to work out the best way for us to support them. From that, we started to deliver weekly food parcels of store cupboard food, chilled food and fruit and vegetables.
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We continued this from April through until the end of August, and expanded the range of people we were supporting as other organisations approached us to help their clients who were struggling. Of the 50 families who registered for food parcels, 70% said they were struggling to afford food because of the pandemic, with a further 22% saying they had found this very difficult even before the pandemic. In both October half term and the Christmas holidays we were still unable to meet in person, and so arranged to deliver food and activity packs to our families again. October half term news headlines were dominated by the campaign on extending Free School Meals into school holidays, headed up by the footballer Marcus Rashford.
