Our Trustee Malcolm sharing his experience volunteering with Food Cycle:
We worked with food cycle which is a charity focused on, reducing loneliness and food poverty.
How it felt.
Very Good
What I did
Serving, feeding, cleaning, hosting, manual labour, connecting with people in need
Disclaimer no pictures of the visitors are here also many of the other volunteers and kitchen staff etc were not photographed! So a big thanks to all the volunteers at the Food Cycle team.
The pre prep videos from the website where great but I was trained by the wonderful Neesa and Nicola who taught me the ropes and prepared for me for the front lines. I could hear the guests arriving and waiting at the door. There was more of a community feel then i was expecting it wasn’t just us handing out food the wide variety of guests surprised me a mixture of races, ages and backgrounds.
I turned up with no real expectations I knew I’d be feeding people some of whom told me their stories and struggles. I served them food and ate along side them the best part was the feeling of giving back to my local community.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that Food Cycle did audits of the food that they took in by weight measuring the before and after and noting this internally. The importance of providing audits is great and we will see how this will be incorporated into our system in the future helping donors trace their positive impact more effectively.
So what was Food cycle looking for ?
In short donations, more volunteers and more exposure from what I can see the Causevest Network will be working to do this and more for any causes listed on the network.