Business Support -
Coventry Building Society
During October 2022, Coventry Building Society provided a generous donation of £200,000, to increase the impact and resilience of the food network across Coventry. We want to see the end of food poverty in the city.
£50,000 of the donation was used to support Coventry Food Network (CFN) to develop a project to alleviate the effects of the cost-of-living crisis, by providing low-cost food to people in or at risk of food poverty. The project helped alleviate the effects of cost of living by helping a low-cost food to people in or at risk of food poverty. A membership cost £5 enabling visitors to do a “weekly shop” to a value of £25, consisting of ambient fresh fruit, vegetables and chilled food / meat. CFN have engaged in discussions with Coventry Food Bank to work more collaboratively to source and procure food in an increasingly challenging environment of increasing food costs.
Moreover, £30,000 of the donation was used to increase CFN’s research and evaluation across the network to better understand the needs, impacts and outcomes for the food network, and develop a progression pathway from foodbank to food hubs with wrap-around provision which his consistent city-wide, with the aim to be more effective, efficient, and provide a sustainable food model for the city.
A large portion of the donation (£50,000) was dedicated to developing the range of advice services at the supermarkets, including financial advice – budgeting, debt management, access to benefit, and employment support by partnering with job shop and other advice services, to improve self-sufficiency, and providing skills and support to reduce and ultimately end their need to access the social supermarket. Furthermore, CFN have built links with Public Health to address health equalities and support healthy eating through cooking sessions and budget recipes.
Coventry Building Society’s contribution, also went towards core funding of overheads including paid staff (supported by volunteers) leading the work of social supermarkets, securing funding, sourcing food, managing distribution and energy costs to create warm, safe, and welcoming spaces within our communities.
The contribution was also crucial to enable us to increase our capacity by purchasing a walk-in freezer, plus additional capacity for in local community supermarkets. Meaning we are now better placed to respond to offers of surplus food and re-distribute city wide. For example supermarkets often have a surplus of meat at Christmas which we had previously not been able to accept due to storage limitation.
Lastly, the donation was useful to provide hampers during Christmas 2022, helping CFN to make it a time of celebration of what can be a vey challenging time. With the rising costs of food, some hubs were unable to afford hampers to provide for users. The model enables households to make a small contribution, for a hamper worth of £60. This was only possible through advance bulk purchase, and the funds enabled us to meet demand during the festive period.
We would like to thank Coventry Building Society for their enormous contribution which has enabled CFN engage all of these endeavours to increase our impact in the community, without their help this couldn’t have been possible.