After over two years of serving the community in north London, FoodCycle’s Station House Community Cafe housed in MIND on Stroud Green Road will no longer be running in its current form after 28 September 2012.
Since August 2010, our cafe has been taking surplus food from local shops including Budgens, Sainsburys, and local bakeries, and with the help of dedicated volunteers from the local community we have been serving delicious meals on a pay-what-you-feel system to local residents, so regardless of your economic situation, there will be a meal there waiting for you at the cafe. A collaboration between local residents, community groups, charities and businesses, it has really been a testament to what is possible in our community when everybody just chips in just a little bit.
The cafe has been open to everyone, each week having a vibrant mix of MIND service users, local residents, students and mothers with their children. The atmosphere has been lively, and it’s not uncommon for a group of toddlers to be dancing to live piano music while mothers try to get them to finish their meals! We hope it has provided a welcoming and friendly environment for all that have had a chance to visit us.
As a result of the difficult economic times that are being felt especially hard by local community groups and charities, we are unfortunately finding that we can no longer run the cafe on its current model. The lack of funding for positive social activities and rising operational costs means that we are no longer able to sustain the operations at the cafe going into 2013.
However, we successfully run 14 Hubs across the country, including four in London, which are run by volunteers and use a spare kitchen space to cook up free meals for people at risk of food poverty and social isolation. We are extremely grateful for all of the help from our dedicated volunteers at Station House and we would invite all interested parties to get in touch with us if they would like to volunteer at one of our London Hubs. We also still have our contacts with supermarkets for surplus food, volunteers and customers in the North London area so we would encourage any existing cafes or volunteers who would like us to share these contacts with them, to get in touch.
We hope to see you there.
FoodCycle Team
This is so sad. We hear every day about families struggling to feed themselves and having to make a choice to eat or heat and yet a relatively low cost operation like this cannot get funding. A footballer on his silly salary could support this with his small change. It is my dream to run something like this in Sandwell after volunteering with Lentil as Anything in Melbourne. Best wishes and I hope someone wakes up to the fact that these projects are worth investing in. There is funding floating around but criteria to meet. Bearwood never got the 10k it was eligible for due to lack of council support so ask Grant Shapps for it! Good luck to all of you on this project.
That’s a real big shame guys.
Well done all at FoodCycle to have kept this great community initiative going for the past couple of years.
I think we should get our heads together and look at how we pool our resources in 2013!
Very best wishes for the future
Sean
Sean Gibbons
Managing Director
Food AWARE Community Interest Company (CIC)
Registered – 06118192
Mob – 07887 750175
Email – [email protected]
Website – http://www.foodawarecic.org.uk
Check out the ‘Food AWARE’ group info page on Facebook!!! – http://www.facebook.com/FoodAWARECIC.
And on Twitter! – http://twitter.com/foodaware
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