Volunteers Wanted for East Yorkshire Foodbank Neighbourhood Food Collection

East Yorkshire Foodbank helped to feed 3630 people in 2015-16 of which 2352 were adults and 1278 were children. 54% of these people lived in and around the Beverley area.

 East Yorkshire Foodbank is urging members of the community to help stop local people from going hungry by volunteering at the UK’s biggest food collection, Tesco’s Neighbourhood Food Collection which runs from Thursday 30 th June – Saturday 2 nd July.

The Neighbourhood Food Collection is run twice annually by Tesco and its partner charities, foodbank charity The Trussell Trust and food redistribution charity FareShare. The aim of the collection is to provide food to people in crisis across the UK, by encouraging Tesco customers to donate items in their local store. Since the collection launched in 2012, 30 million meals have been collected.

East Yorkshire Foodbank, a member of The Trussell Trust network, provides emergency parcels containing three days’ supply of emergency food to people referred by a frontline professional, such as Citizens’ Advice, housing associations or children’s centres. Last summer, thanks to the generosity of Tesco customers 10,767 meals were donated to East Yorkshire Trussell Trust foodbank as a result of the collection.

With a record 1.1 million three day emergency food supplies given to people in crisis last year alone, supermarket collections like this remain an important way to ensure that Trussell Trust foodbanks are stocked, and East Yorkshire Foodbank is asking for local people’s support this summer. It’s easy to make a difference by either donating or volunteering. Volunteers can sign up to help for a little as a couple of hours, and will be needed on hand to offer customers a shopping list of items they can donate, gather the donated food at the store exit, thank customers and box up the food collected.

People interested in donating or volunteering should visit eastyorkshire.foodbank.org.uk or contact Richard Newby on 07842 753728 or by email to foodbev@hotmail.co.uk

East Yorkshire Foodbank is currently asking in particular for donations of: 
UHT Milk
UHT Fruit Juice
500g Bags of Sugar
Tinned Tomatoes
Tinned Fruit
Tinned Fish
Tinned Meat
Tinned Vegetables
Pasta

East Yorkshire Foodbank Development Manager, Richard Newby, said, ‘‘Anyone can find themselves in need of a foodbank. Every week we speak to people who never thought they’d face going hungry, but something unexpected happened, an illness, redundancy or the boiler breaking, and they were thrown into crisis. We’re glad we can be here to help, but our work can only continue because of the unfailing generosity of the community. We’re honestly overwhelmed by the food, money and time people give. Volunteers in particular are the lifeblood of the work we do in helping stop local families going hungry, and the more volunteers we have at the Neighbourhood Food Collection, the more food we can collect. We’d love it if you could show us your support this summer.”