So in January 2017 I decided I was going to do more charity work. Give a bit back. The children are in their teens and need me less, work is going well, so why not give a few hours of my time to a local cause? After considering various options I decided to volunteer at the Foodbank.
Many big charities are run more like corporations with highly paid CEO’s and marketing people which add cost and eat into what goes to the actual cause. The Foodbank is the most direct form of giving I could find. If you donate a tin of soup, then a few days or weeks down the road someone in need will get that tin of soup. There’s no tax on it, no paying for a big London office or an executive team. Some charities end up giving a small fraction of your donation to the final cause once the costs of administration have been lopped off.
At the Foodbank I found an incredibly dedicated team. My initial work was assisting with the website, some PR, a little help with newsletters (I run a web marketing company so all this is within my skillset). The charity has many moving parts. It is primarily a distribution operation requiring collections, warehousing, checking, weighing, storing and of course on the sharp end of the operation the actual giving. All this activity requires reporting in detail so that we are accountable to the people that entrust us to give the food to the people who need it. The simple act of giving someone food actually isn’t that simple and behind the scenes there’s a lot of activity.
The Foodbank was always open for two sessions a week, lunchtimes on Tuesdays and Fridays, but having experienced an almost continual rise in demand since it was established there was a feeling that there could be a need for an evening session. So it was decided to run one from 5 to 6.30pm on Thursdays on a trial basis. This new session meant that we needed more volunteers which is where my story starts. With a shortage of team leaders to manage the evening sessions I put my name forward.
New volunteers have to go through a training programme. As mentioned, it’s a sophisticated and well organised operation and as a cog in the machine you need to make sure you’re doing it right otherwise the machine wouldn’t function properly. You need to have two or three training sessions to ensure you’re familiar with everything and there’s a manual to refer to if you forget any of it. The trainers are kind, patient and there’s a good humour about the place. Yes, we’re helping people and it’s a serious business but it’s done with a positive and optimistic attitude.
Being on the front line team is what it says, it’s the point at which everything we do at the Foodbank starts to mean something. It’s where the rubber hits the road. So the organisation up to this point was something worthwhile but when you’re sat at a table with the recipient, what we do is real. This person needs help. During my first session I was an observer, trying to get a handle on the processes, the layout, the paperwork and a general feel of how it all works. The second was the roll up the sleeves time. There were two staff out front to deal with the public and two in the warehouse packing up the parcels. Within minutes of opening the door our first client arrived. A single mother. She’s had a delay with her benefits, muddied by the fact she has a source of income that technically makes her self-employed but to her is just a bit of pin money cleaning an office on the side. She’s also got behind on her pay-as-you-go energy meter because she didn’t know that it needed topping up in the summer. So just as winter starts creeping in she has to not only start paying for the warmth of her family she has to find cash to pay the backlog she didn’t even know she had. There’s a quiet dignity to her. She really doesn’t want to be here. The volunteers chat to her kindly but not patronisingly. Really this could be any of us, she’s not a pity case. She’s one of us, just unlucky and the system seems to only deal in logic. It just does facts. And if the facts don’t compute then a family goes hungry. She’s got a friend to give her a lift down and we give her supplies for the next few days whilst she sorts her money out. One of the people in the warehouse puts in some chocolate bars for the children.
There’s not much time to dwell on what’s happened because by the time the young mum leaves there’s more people queuing up. We feed twenty-five people, all stories of similar heartbreak and bad luck. Yes, there are a few people who’ve strayed from societies accepted way of doing things and there were a few drink stories and drug stories and crime stories and stories that if you lead a busy hustle bustle life might leave you muttering something like it’s their own fault. Twenty-five people would have gone hungry that Thursday night. Or perhaps they would have visited a loan shark. Or sold some furniture. Or god knows what. What do you do when you have children and can’t turn on the heating? The people of Stratford were there for them and it’s heartening to be able to help.
So much of what we hear about the Foodbank is politicised and I want to avoid this. The rise of the Foodbank isn’t about the actions of one set of politicians. It’s a perfect storm of societal changes, breakdown of community, a complex welfare system which can only be complex because of the amount of people that use it, pressure on budgets, lack of housing, loss of compassion, the culture of the self, increased energy and food prices and on and on. The people I’ve met who volunteer at the Foodbank aren’t united by political affiliation but by that persistent nagging human need to help each other. That need is primeval, it’s hundreds of thousands of years old and it’s in all of us. So next time you’re in the supermarket grab some soup and drop it in the Foodbank basket. Or if you want to make a more direct difference then get in touch and join us.
Check out the volunteer page here.
G Griffiths
Trainee Front Line manager