Food Solutions Fund

We would use the grant to open the café on a Wednesday as well as helping to support the already open days. Food supplies and equipment are expensive, and these are our largest overheads, a large proportion of the funding will be used to cover this cost. The volunteers work extremely hard, many of them are from a background of addiction or mental health, they are integral to the whole running of the café project.

Army of Kindness

£4,000

We will provide over 500 hot meals once a week on a Thursday, 5pm- 6pm from October to end of March 2024. The total amount of sessions will be 27. The project will take place at St Andrews Church, OL16 2HZ, which is walking distance from town centre, and has a walking distance bus station. 

We would like to increase the hours of our food pantry during the winter period, and open it for an additional day or maybe a few more hours on Saturday, depending on what works for the service users. The food prices have gone up and the running costs are increasing. We would also like to introduce a pilot project on cooking food, and how to make the most out of your money. We would also like to end food waste, so use food products we already have to create delicious new meals. We would also like to promote healthy, nutritional home cooked meals from different cuisines

We provide each member with a pre-packed food bag with a retail value of approximately £12 weekly. We currently have 30 members each week. We also provide one-off free emergency parcels to anyone who has no money, and needs food and work with the emergency food delivery initiative Helping Hands. 
 

Deeplish Community Centre Association

We aim to promote community social eating project which will include social welfare and financial advice. We will address well-being and improve local people’s participation in well-being activities through informal education, engagement and financial, debt advice. We will bring people together and connect them to create a circle of friends.

We held a consultation with our members to discover what they felt was most beneficial to them in their shop, and they said having eggs and halal meat was the real winner. The money we receive will help pay for the weekly spend of halal meat and eggs. This will be provided as part of their shop at no extra cost. The saving members make from this food gives them extra money to spend on the bills and other living costs. We will use a local retailer to buy these additional items so we can show our community support to small local businesses who are also struggling. 

Hebron Church

We want to provide a brand-new, weekday social eating place at Hebron Church, supporting 30 families for people living in the Falinge estate and surrounding area, which is the 31st most deprived community in England, and at risk of anti-social behaviour, isolation, food, and fuel poverty. The sessions will run for approximately three hours.

HMR Circle Volunteer Drivers Service

We will use the grant to ensure we can continue to deliver our current offer, we will use the money to grow and develop that offer, into new geographical areas of the borough and increase the frequency. Our initial target area is Middleton for further expansion of the Lunch Club-club offer. Within all the Lunch Club-Clubs will be access to debt and benefit advice as well as the dissemination of information of the offers and support available to people. The Lunch Club-Clubs, both regular and pop-up, will incorporate food demonstrations to showcase low-cost recipes and techniques. Following on from these, we will offer demonstrations around cooking on a budget, for those already taking part and encouraging and recruiting new participants.

Humans MCR

We will use the grant to develop our Foodbank and Grocers services in Rochdale. Our Foodbank on-wheels provides food for at least three days – and we always include fresh produce in these parcels to ensure our clients are given the resources to produce nutritionally complete meals. 95% of our parcels are delivered within 24 hours of referral - 100% are delivered within 48. A step up from this is our Community Grocers on-wheels, which uses food destined for landfill to provide clients at risk of falling into poverty (or those who are already there and need help getting out) with a week’s worth of fresh groceries of their choice, delivered to their door. 

Kashmir Youth Project

KYP Community Pantry is open every Wednesday and Friday 10am -1pm, providing items such as, seasonings, rice, oil, flour, lentils, tinned spinach, tinned saag, chickpeas, sauces, naan breads, chapatti and other items, at a cost of £4 for 10 items. The funding will help us continue provision of this service in view of increased demand and continuing pressures on family finances brought about by the cost of living crisis.
The funding will enable us to provide:

• Equipment, project resources and running costs: additional equipment to safely store and handle food items, including an additional fridge
• Purchase of food: culturally specific and religiously acceptable food items, such as halal products, seasonings, rice, oil, flour, lentils, tinned spinach, tinned saag, chickpeas, sauces, naan breads, chapatti and other items. Current cost of food items is £420 pw. The funding applied for will enable us to buy stock and equipment to run the pantry for 5 months (£420 x 20wks)

Kirkholt Community Church

Our aim is to help people who are in crisis by giving them a food parcel to help feed themselves and their families. We don’t just help with Food parcels, we also offer a free breakfast every Tuesday morning to anyone who comes in from the community. We also have a Men's Support Group in the main hall, running at the same time as the free breakfast, and we serve the men theirs in the hall also. The breakfast consists of sausage and egg sandwiches, toast, crumpets, cereals, tea, coffee or juice. 

Kirkholt Pantry

The grant will help bridge the cost of living gap faced by our members by ensuring that each member will have the essential food items of bread, milk and eggs, as part of their weekly shop. This will be provided at no extra cost. 

Lamet Habayeb Association

As an Arab community in Rochdale, we usually like to share our traditional Arabic food with everyone in the community. Through this project we aim at bringing communities together to learn about Arabic culture and learn how to prepare Middle eastern recipes on a budget. Our cooking project aims to help individuals and families prepare simple and nutritious meals on a budget. Our organisation is committed to supporting disadvantaged, isolated, and BME communities by providing them with the necessary skills to cook healthy food at low cost.

Nigeria Community Association

This funding will support The African Food Bank Project which is a transformative initiative aimed at addressing critical food-related challenges within local communities. This project aligns seamlessly with the fund's priorities and objectives

The project fits into the Emergency Food priority. Our proposal is to use our musical and dance skills to raise to generate some more stocks for the Food Solutions Network. We have come up with two ideas, based on activities we’ve done in the past that have been succesful. We are asking for a small amount of funding to help us to do these activities which should generate way more than the funds requested in food donations

The Dale Food Pantry provides a low cost, top-up shop for individuals who may be struggling to afford food, allowing people to choose a selection of ten items for a voluntary donation of £10. Following the closure of the Community Warehouse, we would like to utilise the majority of this grant to provide a supplementary top-up shop for the Dale Food Pantry each week. We would also like to use a portion of the grant to run a social eating project, providing weekly access to hot food for refugees and people seeking sanctuary.

Rochdale Connections Trust

We would like to use the funds to run a 'Family Foodie Project' which would be in addition to our current menu of offers. The idea is to create a safe space where we will invite families and participants to get together once a week for a home-cooked meal that they will help prepare. 

Rochdale Foodbank

We will use the grant to buy food.  Our emergency food parcel typically contains around 24-30 items of food. There is at least sufficient food for three days, or ten meals, and this is all ambient – tins and packets. In addition, we supply fresh bread, eggs and a small amount of fruit. 

Rochdale Womens Welfare Association

Our project will provide emergency and immediate food, especially to women and girls escaping domestic abuse. The funding will also be used to support our Luncheon Club which currently runs successfully.

Smallbridge Pantry

The money we receive will help bridge the cost-of-living gap by ensuring each member has the basic bread, milk, eggs, and pasta offer weekly. These food items can be used to make breakfast and lunch. This will be provided as part of our members shop at no extra cost. The saving members make from this food gives them extra money to spend on the bills and other living costs.  

Soup Kitchen Rochdale

We are applying for this fund to enable us to offer a stable bagging service for a twelve-week period. This will have huge benefits within the community as in the past we have known that by offering the service it can reduce local crime (shoplifting of food items), has helped with recovery (service users with historical malnourishment don’t heal from abscesses etc. as not as much nutrition/hydration - our service ensure they have meals

SVP Heywood Foodbank

The aim of this project is to extend and enhance the provision of food at Heywood Food Bank in addition to developing a support network with the aim of moving clients out of food poverty. This projects aims to provide a more sustainable model of food distribution going forward by exploring free food/waste food options and increasing the number of food suppliers to the foodbank by making use of Fairshare and FairshareGo for example. This will require the purchase of additional fridges and freezers to store the food safely and will allow the food bank to enhance the food they provide by offering a range of fresh fruit and vegetables along with cooked and baked goods which are not currently offered. 

Our proposal is to use the funding to provide support to families for 20 weeks during the winter period, November 2023-March 2024. We would use the funding to:

• Buy additional weekly stocks of food for both the Pantry and the Foodbank so that we can continue to support families experiencing crisis or cost-of-living shortages during the winter period. This food would include a combination of fresh chilled, frozen, and/or fresh vegetables for the Pantry, and ambient food items for the Foodbank. These purchases will help guarantee that we have enough food items in stock to cover weekly family visits to the Pantry, and items for inclusion in our three-day emergency parcels for the Foodbank.
• Subsidise the weekly Pantry membership fee (£4.50) for 100 members for four weeks during December/January to give them some spare cash around the Christmas/New Year period. Two weeks before, and two weeks after when other household costs are quite high. It is a small amount (£18) per family, but it does make a difference when there is a lot of pressure on Christmas spending. The family will not be given money, they will just not be charged for their weekly membership fee for those four weeks, essentially receiving four free visits.

The Veterans Food Co CIC

This project is to develop a core programme of trained volunteers who can cook food from the food bank into meals ready for families to reheat, we want to create LCT. Lighthouse Cooking Team It will be different to other projects, we want to link in with people who grow food i.e., local allotments supermarkets and other food sources. People who attend the Lighthouse Project can come and learn cooking skills from the LCT, thereby reducing their own food budget and improving their well-being. 

Wonderfully Made Woman

The Cost of Living Cultural Food Support Project aims to support 50 African women in Middleton through weekly food support. This will help reduce financial hardship amongst women and their families and improve well being. We want to provide culturally appropriate food support for African women.