This is a speech I was able to give on Monday morning of General Synod:
Thank you, chair. I warmly welcome this motion. When I became vicar of a parish in the wealthy New Forest eleven years ago, we fed no-one. Now we feed some fifty families a week.
During the pandemic, the focus of our work with food poverty was our own basics bank. Now it is by working with a charity called FareShare which I want to commend to you now. FareShare liaises with supermarkets to see that unsold food does not go into landfill. Instead, every Friday morning our church volunteers transform our car park into a delivery centre, our hall opens as a community café and a large van arrives with basics and more. For a small charge of between £2 for a single person and £5 for a family, local people receive a minimum of £30 worth of food (two or three large shopping bags) which includes basics as well as special items which fall victim to the whims of the free market: unusual vegetables like celeriac (Synod is pretty middle class – I imagine some here would normally have had a celeriac smoothy for breakfast); vegan food; luxury chocolates. It can be quite exciting to see what arrives. One week we had a glut of hundreds of avocados which we were about to advertise to the whole community. Since a small fee is charged (which we can cover as a church if it is an impediment) and because cutting food waste is also good for the environment, we find that some of the assumed stigma of using a basics bank is lifted. Most people are happy to say that they use FareShare. We also continue to work with our local basics bank too.
Nationally, FareShare supports over 8000 projects like ours, feeding over a million people a year. Perhaps they could be part of your church’s fight against food poverty. I commend this motion, though I am saddened by the need for it.
Benjamin Sargent 