FoodCycle is preparing to open its first Wythenshawe-based free meals service for local residents. FoodCycle currently operate a free meals service in Prestwich, Levenshulme and Salford, and hope to restart the Oldham FoodCycle Project soon too.
FoodCycle is a national charity established in 2009, with the aim of tackling food poverty and social isolation using donated surplus food.
Briefly, FoodCycle utilises suitable kitchens in which their volunteers cook the fresh surplus food donated to them, producing healthy hot vegetarian meals for anyone who would like one. The meals are completely free and anyone can just turn up; typically guests include low income families, homeless people, isolated older people, and people struggling to ‘make ends meet’.
Ordinarily, people would arrive to enjoy a free communal 3 course meal – so addressing loneliness as well as hunger – and FoodCycle will be returning to that as soon as they are all permitted to do so. But of course in the current climate this is impossible. So for the duration of Covid-restrictions FoodCycle have been setting up weekly ‘Cook and Collect’ projects across the country wherever they can find a suitable space – and the volunteers of course.
This involves guests coming along to collect their safely packaged hot meals (usually there’s a little extra donated food for people to take away too). FoodCycle stringently adheres to all Covid-safe policies of course, including providing PPE for all volunteers and guests and observing social distancing.
How you can help
- FoodCycle would like the people of Wythenshawe to know about the charity’s service, so that they and their families and neighbours could benefit from nutritious free food
- FoodCycle would like to attract local volunteers who they can support and train. Lead volunteers learn Teamwork, Leadership and Delegation, Cooking skills, Problem-solving and Relationship-building, and among the free training provided is: Food Safety Level 2, Safeguarding and First Aid
- FoodCycle would like more local venues from which they could provide their weekly meals service. Suitable venues would ideally have a five or six-hob cooker (or two 4 hob cookers), and would be available once a week regularly for 5 hours. Venues would need to have capacity to seat at least 30-40 people at a time, because when the pandemic restrictions lessen considerably, each Cook and Collect project will become a venue from which FoodCycle will run their free communal meals services again.
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