There have been so many changes here at FareShare Yorkshire over the last 14 months. From brand new courses, to exciting milestones…we’re going to take a look back at some of the highlights.
Right from New Year’s Day we were excited to announce that our CEO, Gareth, had been appointed an MBE in the New Years’ Honours. This was in recognition for Services to the Charity Sector, and just a fortnight ago in February 2023, Gareth was presented with this by His Majesty the King at Windsor.
Rewind back to February 2022 and we hit a huge milestone. In the space of 660 days, our team had supplied enough food to vital frontline organisations across Yorkshire to contribute to 10 million meals. That’s 631 meals per hour! We were supporting over 400 Community Food Members (CFMs) across Yorkshire each year, including schools, elderly lunch clubs, community pantries, refuges, holiday hunger services, shelters and many more. We are incredibly grateful to our volunteers, funders and food partners be able to give high-quality surplus food to these incredible organisations and look forward to continue supporting them in the future.
2022 also saw the launch of our FullCrumb Kitchen at our central Leeds Centre, which was only made possible by the kind support of the Albert Gubay Foundation. AGF has opened the doors wide for us to offer more training to individuals and charities across West and North Yorkshire in a way we’ve never been able before. AGF also provided more space for our Project Manager, Chris, to create brand new recipes and fresh cookery ideas to share, both for hard-to-use surplus and all kinds of diverse ingredients we intercept. This kitchen is now running alongside its sister training kitchen at our Barnsley Centre and Chris’ volunteers support the delivery of this. Chris led accredited food hygiene classes alongside cookery courses, appeared at various food festivals and events, opening a new chapter in The FullCrumb Kitchen by being mobile, including launching cookery events at Good Food Barnsley.
In the Spring, we hit another milestone. We had prevented over 1,100 tonnes of surplus food from going to waste across Yorkshire and the North since October 2018. Using our 7.5 tonne lorry, our amazing drivers were able to collect this surplus from our food partners.
Four of our CFMs received their 1,000th delivery, which was acknowledged amidst the Cost of Living crisis. The national crisis only worsened and continued to affect the country as the year went on, but with the dedicated hard work from our drivers, volunteers and wider team, we were able to continue providing much-needed support.
We developed our first surplus cookbook which will be published in 2023 through the support of the Delamere Dairy Foundation.
We launched our second freezer van through the support of Sainsbury’s, enabling us to go from providing up to 1 tonne a day of frozen surplus to up to 2 tonnes.
We trialled environmentally friendly alternatives to plastic wrap that is going to enable us to cease all use of single use plastic wrap in our Centres from June 2023.
We held more corporate days than ever before, enabling both food and non food companies to see our team in action and lend badly needed support, especially for mass sorting tasks.
Lastly we gained the support of some wonderful new partners such as Kirsty’s, Speedibake, Finsbury Foods, AxioLogik, WYCA and Department for Transport to name a few. The help of our partners makes a huge difference and without them we would not be able to cope with frontline need.
This year, we hope to continue to widen our provision, giving more of our CFMs the chance to benefit from our frozen membership and free courses.
- If you’d like to support the work of FareShare Yorkshire, just £1 makes such a POWERFUL difference. Find out more about our Power of a Pound campaign here: https://www.fareshareyorkshire.org/power-of-a-pound-campaign-launches/
- If you are a food company who would like to donate your surplus food and drink for us to collect FREE of charge, please contact [email protected] for more information.
- If you are a CFM who would like to learn more about our courses, learning opportunities or frozen provision, please contact [email protected]
