The surge in food banks and food poverty projects in recent years has seen communities across the UK rise to fill the void created by austerity and the cost of living. Meeting rising hunger is not something that people do for the glory, but the recent Voices to End Hunger Awards celebrated the grassroots activists innovating to tackle food poverty.
Organised by political consultancy The Advocacy Team, the awards honoured Volunteers on Wheels – a service delivering supplies to food banks – and Neighbourly – a tech solution to getting food to people who need it – and more at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London. Feeding Britain founder Andrew Forsey and Itofa Ivarah, who runs My9jaFoodBank to deliver nutritious meals to out-of-school children in Nigeria, were also among the winners.
Surplus to Supper scooped an award – along with the £1,000 cash prize each winner received – and operations director Claire Hopkins told Big Issue that the victory was a boost among her four members of staff and 258 volunteers.
The Sudbury-on-Thames-based charity launched in 2018 after Hopkins spoke to a supermarket manager who was about to send 42 boxes of food into landfill.
She then set out to turn the surplus food into nutritious meals for people who need them, even proving the point by hiring a chef to craft a fine-dining meal out of waste food before telling diners where the food came from at the end.
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Now Surplus to Supper’s kitchen turns waste food into 2,000 meals a week before distributing them to youth clubs, people living with dementia, carers and other groups who need a meal. They also run a market at the weekend and a catering arm with the commercial business subsidising the meals they create for people in food poverty.
