Thoughts from Helen Voce, our Area Operations manager who joined us in August
I’ve had an interesting three months since I joined Hope Nottingham in August as the Area Operations Manager. My job splits in two with half of it supporting Dominique Scott, Hope CEO, to ensure the organisation runs smoothly and half of it supporting our food bank network. I’ve visited all our foodbank sessions across our 14 sites and met most of our volunteers. What a team!
Our food banks are really needed. I’ve taken calls in the office from professionals who want to sign up as referral agencies as they are seeing people in crisis who need a food parcel – one was supporting a service user who was being denied food as a form of abuse, another was helping someone newly unemployed as a result of an accident who was waiting for their benefits to be processed. We are able to sign the professional up immediately, they can issue a voucher and their client can be in a food bank later that day or the next day at the latest. A crisis needs an immediate response and our food is able to offer this with several sessions happening around East and West Nottingham Foodbank Monday to Saturday.
As well as the food, I’ve seen that guests always get a warm welcome, a hot drink and a biscuit or two. Volunteers take the time to have a chat with guests while their parcel is being prepared and often introduce them to the advice provision happening in a quiet corner or signpost them to other local services who could help with their situation.
Sessions can be busy and while volunteers say they often feel shattered at the end of their shift they also feel satisfied that so many people have been supported. Since April this year we’ve provided over 10,500 individual parcels, that’s a lot of food. We receive generous donations from many different sources. I weighed in donations that came to the door at Hope House this morning. It was over 100kg from a local junior school and churches and companies and individuals ring the door bell every day with bags full of tins. Our sorters get crates ready for our van team to deliver to our satellites along with collections from our warehouse and supermarkets. Many of our satellites carry out their own collections from their local stores and receive donations directly to their sites too. However, like most other foodbanks, we face the challenge of meeting the continual high demand, at a time when due to rising living costs, donation levels have been falling. If you know of any workplaces that would like to set up a collection point, please do get in touch.
So thank you to all our guests, volunteers and staff for the warm welcome you have given me. I’ll be working hard to make sure our foodbanks continue to receive the food we need to meet the increased demand we are seeing. If you’d like to talk about how you could support our food banks, we'd love to hear from you. You can get in touch with us at hope@hopenottingham.org.uk or by calling us on 0303 040 1110.
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