FareShare
www.fareshare.org.uk
We have been supporting Fareshare London since January 2006.
Our money has gone toward supporting the Eat Well Road Shows:
training events aimed at educating disadvantaged people from
the local community. The events provided training in cooking,
preparing and shopping for healthy food, whilst on a low budget,
particularly useful for those people who are moving from hostel
into their own accommodation.
I have been trying to organize a visit to one of these events so we could have the opportunity to see how they are being run, and also help out. Unfortunately Fareshare has kept me badly informed of their activities and so this visit has not gone ahead. Aside from that I still believe that Fareshare remain a very effective organisation who are well worthy of our support.
Everyday supermarkets are forced to landfill tonnes of fresh food; food that is perfectly OK to eat but is surplus to requirements and cannot be sold before it goes past its sell by date. At the same time 4 million people in the UK cannot afford a healthy diet.
Putting
two and two together Fareshare was set up in 
the early nineties.
Run largely by volunteers it collects this surplus food and delivers
it to a range of community initiatives from homeless shelters
to breakfast clubs at inner city schools.
However the impact that this has goes far beyond simply providing good quality free food. Before Fareshare will start regularly delivering food, each partner organisation must identify projects that it will undertake with the surplus cash saved from buying food in the first place. In this way Fareshare indirectly funds thousands of charitable projects within the communities that it operates. They also employ and train people from their partner organisations. In this way, people often lacking skills and facing long term unemployment are given the opportunity to get training in areas such as food handling, health & hygiene and fork lift truck driving.
This year, if successfully elected, our money will continue to fund the ‘Eat Well Road Shows' – our donation will cover one 3-day training event for around 10 people.
John Arnold, January 2007