Sign In / Register
Christmas has come early for the Loaves and Fishes Foodbank Wellsford Charitable Trust.
At one stage, the trust was looking at cancelling this year’s Christmas Treat food parcels due to a lack of funding, but at the 11th hour a generous donation from the Wellsford Co-Operating Parish means they can still be given out to struggling families.
Trust chairperson Karen Lennon says “it’s just amazing”.
“We were at crunch time deciding if we could do the parcels. We had contacted our biggest referring organisations to tell them we couldn’t do it this year,” she says.
“Now we can help over 100 families get through Christmas with those extra things you just can’t buy when you’re on a tight budget – your tarts, chippies, shortbread, and Christmas pudding.
“It’s quite involved working with supermarkets to get the food, and all the organisations and schools to get the referrals, so the donation has been in the nick of time. It seems miracles do happen.”
It’s not just at Christmas the foodbank helps those in need, though.
Lennon says it distributes up to 20 food parcels to people from across Rodney on a weekly basis.
“We help all sorts of clients. A family with two incomes might have just been surviving and then a partner either gets sick or they’ve been made redundant, which has been happening a lot more recently,” she says.
“And especially people on their own, someone who’s retired and their pension just won’t stretch.”
Lennon says the foodbank relies on donations from the community and other charities, but it hasn’t been able to get funding on a regular basis.
Compounding the problem is the fact that the amount of donated food the foodbank receives via KiwiHarvest Food Rescue is significantly less than last year.
“We were getting up to 250kg a week of perishables and non-perishables, and we’re down to 200kg.
There’s been a shortfall, and we’ve needed to make that up, so that’s eating into the funds we have in reserve,” Lennon says.
“We used to buy extras [for our parcels] such as toiletries, toothbrushes and toothpaste, but we’ve had to stop that now and just concentrate on the food.”
To make a donation, call Karen at the foodbank on 021 0908 9333.
Or you can donate here: Loaves & Fishes Foodbank Wellsford, ASB 12-3094-0284123-50, Charity Number CC61511
