This year after a lot of hard work I teamed up with Kent Union Volunteering to introduce food donations at the end of the academic year. We conducted a lot of research and met with a number of charities to determine what the University could do with food that our students hadn’t used and what good would come of this.
We decided to work with FareShare based in Ashford who collect food donations from places such as Universities and even Tesco’s in the South East. FareShare share a warehouse with the Trussell Trust which is another charity that takes food donations, this means that if one charity has a surplus or a shortage of a certain item they can share between them to make sure that they help the most people, what a great idea!!
The types of food items that FareShare accept need to be in-date and sealed such as rice, pasta, tinned meats, tinned fish, tinned fruits, tinned vegetables, cereals, sugar, tea, coffee, wet wipes, jams, sauces, oats, soups, long life milk, noodles, flavour packets, gravy and much more! FareShare then box together a range of the food and give to families that are in need who live in the Ashford, Swale, Maidstone and Thanet Districts of Kent. There are distribution points at Children’s Centres and Churches.
Families who need the service are referred by various agencies such as Social Services, Job Centre Plus and Housing Departments. And each and every one of the families who get given a box will very much appreciate everyone’s donations, each box will feed a family of 4 for 5 days, isn’t that incredible!
So for this year’s chuck outs we decided to hold two separate days during the last week of term to give students the opportunity to donate their unused food, our first event took place at the Parkwood Admin Building from 11am till 3pm on Tuesday the 14th of June. Special thanks to Kent Hospitality and the Head Receptionist who allowed us to camp out in the building for most of the day! We managed to fill around 12 shopping crates of food and was shocked with the amount students were donating.
Our second event took place at Rutherford Atrium once again from 11am to 3pm on Friday the 17th of June, and boy were we surprised! Food just kept arriving every few minutes with some students bringing the food from their whole house! It was amazing to see how much the students here at Kent care about donating their food to those in need, as the day went on we were more and more proud of our students and felt completely overwhelmed by the students kindness. Thank you to the Rutherford master who allowed us to be in the atrium for the day. We were even surprised to hear that Parkwood were still accepting donations which FareShare went and collected after coming up to Rutherford!
Once I get the Inventory I will tweet the amount of food that was donated on both days and how many boxes our donations would have created.
I’m sure I speak for the University and FareShare when I say how amazing our students are and without them these events would not have been a success!
Our future plan is to have these events each time students leave their accommodation for a period of time such as Christmas, Easter and the Summer. Watch out for future dates on our twitter page!
Wishing you all an amazing summer (hopefully the weather will pick up) and we will see you in late September!