Weald Community Fridge – growing and changing

It’s been an exciting week for the Weald Community Fridge (WCF) – to date we’ve delivered over 530 kilos of food since we started the project, which will have made over 1100 meals for the people we deliver to. Our team of volunteer drivers have been going out twice a week, dropping food at over forty addresses, which is an incredible feat.

And our hard work is being rewarded. First of all, the Sussex Policy Property Fund has granted us £353 to buy a polytunnel so that we can grow crops more effectively, giving us a reliable source of food to deliver. Once the COVID-19 restrictions are over, we can continue to use the polytunnel to grow food to put in the Community Fridge and we can also hold horticultural classes there!

Second, Fareshare have decided that we qualify for a food delivery, so from Wednesday the Community Fridge will be receiving a weekly donation of up to 100 kilos of food. To put that in perspective – between the first week of April and this Sunday (17 May) we’ve delivered 500 kilos. Now we’re going deliver about 100 kilos A WEEK!

So things will change. We can take on more households for food, and maybe even add a third delivery date, we definitely need more drivers, especially as some of our current volunteers have part-time and freelance work that means they can’t deliver for us. And we need somebody else to help with bagging food and logistics. Because we’re asking that person to make a commitment to the WCF, hopefully until the lockdown ends, we’d like to offer the role to somebody who’s unemployed or underemployed. We can pay for Food Hygiene Level 2 training and will be able to offer supervision, basic training and a reference when things return to normal, which we hope might help someone find satisfying work or further training.

So if you, or somebody you know, would be interested in:

1 Delivering food for the WCF on either Thursday or Sunday

2 Helping with food bagging (Thursday and Sunday mornings) and logistics (throughout the week).

Please get in touch via wealdallotments@gmail.com.