Not for Profit
Published: April 29, 2021 | Updated: 30th April 2021
“We do a lot more than just emergency food.”
That’s the message from Faithworks, the charity that partners with, and provides, food bank support in Christchurch, Poole, Wimborne & Blandford.
Its new Life Centre model offers a wide range of support including budgeting and debt advice.
Help is also provided with housing, community meals and life skills training, such as Cooking on a Budget.
Nick Bold, Life Centres Project Manager for Faithworks, pictured left, said: “Food is only one small part of what’s necessary to help a household thrive.
“We all need opportunities to connect with, and contribute to, our neighbourhoods and that’s what Life Centres are all about.”
Creative solutions that help people thrive are at the heart of the centres.
One example was the provision of slow cookers during lockdown last year.
It resulted from hearing that one family were surviving on eating cold meals as they could not afford the electricity.
Thanks to a range of local funders, including Dorset Community Foundation, 40 slow cookers and more than 7,000 fresh fruit and veg parcels have now been given out by Christchurch, Poole, Wimborne and Blandford Food Banks.
It’s enabled people to cook nutritious, healthy hot meals on a budget.
Faithworks is a founding member of the BCP Access to Food Partnership and the slow cooker initiative has moved it closer to the partnership’s vision that ‘everyone can feed their families enough nutritious food all the time.’
One Mum said: “Thank you so much for the food and toiletries and the slow cooker.
“I have spent all afternoon cooking – and the slow cooker is on with the stew which my son will love.
“What’s more I have really enjoyed being in the kitchen.”
Gill Payne, Poole Food Bank Manager, pictured right, said: “It’s no longer that we just give three days’ worth of food.
“We will walk alongside people through any problem that they’re having, and for as long as it takes for them to say ‘I can do this now’.”
