A North Wales Housing pilot scheme with the North Wales arm of national charity, FareShare has been a huge success.
The FareShare ethos of ‘No good food should be wasted’, sees the non-profit organisation, FareShare North Wales, run by social enterprise Crest Co-operative, reclaim fit for purpose food from businesses, including supermarkets, and redistribute it to disadvantaged people throughout the community.
NWH is currently piloting their ‘Bronze’ food package at three of its homeless hostels, St Mary’s, Pendinas and Noddfa. Under the initiative, a weekly food parcel delivery is made to each hostel for a nominal fee, with a package made up of dried or tinned foods. Fareshare contact North Wales Housing to advise what foods are available – at which point the hostels place their order. More recently, other parts of NWH’s Supported Housing have also been able to benefit from the scheme including the Outreach and Move On teams.
North Wales Housing and FareShare North Wales are now exploring new ways in which other tenants across North Wales can benefit from the initiative.
X of Noddfa Hostel said: “The FareShare partnership with Noddfa has been a big success for the residents here. Through this initiative, they receive a range of good quality food that helps them to maintain a balanced diet. The additional food also encourages service users to try out different recipes and be more innovative with the different ingredients that they have each week.
“The FareShare food is used as part of the preparation for house meetings where services users work as part of a team, preparing the food for the meeting whilst learning new cooking skills.
“At Noddfa, we also sell the food to the residents at a low cost and any money made is reinvested into the hostel, supporting the services users for tenant engagement activities such as bingo and DVD evenings and quiz nights.”
Residents say that they are benefiting from the scheme and feel that they now know where to get good quality food at a decent price. Any money saved from buying FareShare food can also be saved towards a deposit on a flat when service users are ready to move on.
Paul Diggory, Chief Executive at North Wales Housing said: “This is clearly a fantastic scheme that we are keen to be more closely involved in. We are currently looking at how this can work for us on a wider scale with the potential of trialing other packages that will allow us to make the most of the FareShare offering.
“Clearly too much good food is wasted unnecessarily and FareShare tackle two very important issues – food waste and supporting disadvantaged people in our communities.”