Steps 8 CIC were supported through the Foundation’s Coronavirus Resilience Fund and were awarded £1500 to run a community foodbank.
The foodbank will address immediate hunger by working with children centres, community centres, and schools providing nutritionally balanced diets to the most vulnerable.
Two of the schools they have been working with are St Edmund’s Primary and Nursery and St Patrick’s Catholic Primary School in Birmingham, their Executive Headteacher, Mary O’Friel, said:
“We are two schools who serve a vulnerable and deprived community comprising of many families who are or have previously been refugees, asylum seekers, or have no recourse to public funds.
“Our free school meal entitlement is high, nearly 70% at St Edmund’s and over 40% at St Patrick’s. We also have several looked after children or families considered vulnerable and supported by a social worker.”
3 million children in the UK are at risk of going hungry during school holidays and this unscheduled break is no different.
“As this pandemic started and schools were closed we had a great deal of concern about our families accessing enough food and support.
“Steps CIC is a company we have worked with for many years. From December we started collecting food from Steps CIC in Handsworth and ran a foodbank at both schools. This helped us identify some of our more vulnerable families. Since the pandemic, the foodbank food has been delivered St Edmund’s and we have been making up food parcels to deliver every Tuesday and Friday.
“The combination of the support from Steps 8 foodbank and our kitchen parcels is resulting in us making about 100 food deliveries a week to those in need. We have also been able to share this with four other schools who have distributed to their vulnerable families.
“They (Steps 8 CIC) are doing a great job in supporting us to feed our vulnerable pupils and families!”
For a full list of organisations supported through the Coronavirus Resilience Fund, click here.
To apply for the Coronavirus Resilience Fund, click here.
If you would like to support the Coronavirus Resilience Fund, click here.