Your chance to donate as Devizes food bank demands soar by seventy per cent

With demand increased 70 per cent in the past year, the growing network of Food Bank donation sites in the Marlborough area is due to be extended with a new collection point added too.

Customers at Waitrose this weekend will be able to donate food to trolleys manned by volunteers from the Devizes Food Bank between 8am and 4pm on Saturday and Sunday.

And next month Marlborough’s Tesco  store will be part of a nation-wide food bank appeal, which is expected to produce dramatic results as the plight of families in crisis continues to soar.

“The demand has increased by 70 per cent in the past year,” Alan Beamish, co-ordinator of the Devizes Food Bank for the past three years, told Marlborough News Online.

“Last year we collected 12 tonnes of food locally and fed 1,500 people.  And this year we’ve almost reach that figure already.  The demand is increasing in the Marlborough area, everywhere in fact it’s the same.”

Devizes Food Bank, which serves Marlborough and beyond to villages like Froxfield and Great Bedwyn, as well as to Pewsey, is in talks to open a coffee morning collection centre at Christ Church, Marlborough.

 It already runs a similar project at St Andrew’s Church, in Devizes, where holders of red vouchers issued by local government agencies across Wiltshire can collect the food they need.

“Volunteers open the boxes discreetly and put the food into supermarket shopping bags for them,” explained Mr Beamish.

“The families going hungry are often those affected by domestic violence or debt or have drug and alcohol problems.

“I’ve talked to Heather Cooper, the Methodist minister at Christ Church, and I am hopeful that some time in the coming month we can do the same thing there — on Friday mornings, between 10 and 12.

“But we need to finalise the details.  Then people with a red voucher from places Great Bedwyn, East Grafton and Burbage won’t have to come all the way to Devizes to pick up the food they desperately need.”

The Devizes Food Bank, launched five years ago as part of the Salisbury-based Trussell Trust pioneer campaign, operates as the  hub for 45 different agencies ranging from social services, health teams and children’s centres to housing, Age UK and the Citizens Advice Bureau.

It also connects to the children’s centres based in Marlborough and Pewsey with the result that 98 per cent of food collected goes out through the agencies.

There is also a phone number people can call – 0300 4567 – that connects to Wiltshire Council centres in Devizes, Chippenham and Trowbridge, who make assessments of peoples’ immediate needs.

“Nobody is refused food, but we have to be careful about some people trying it on,” said Mr Beamish, who took up his co-ordinator role after retiring from his post as a youth worker assessing teenagers with drug and alcohol difficulties and referring them to local medical centres, including the one in Marlborough.

Residents this weekend who will be asked to donate food will be shown a menu  of items at the two entrances to Waitrose.  They can then select one or more items and place it in volunteer’s trolleys as they leave.

“What we mostly need is sugar, long-life milk, jams, biscuits, instant mash and sponge puddings,” added Mr Beamish . “We can’t be choosey about what we collect and we always get an excess of breakfast cereals and baked beans. So that is worth knowing in advance.”

It’s thanks to public support that food banks can cope Admiration for the way the public is supporting food banks in the challenge they face to feed a growing army of hungry people has come from David McAuley, operations director of the pioneering Trussell Trust. The Salisbury-based charity was launched 13 years ago to develop a national network of community-run food banks that depend on donations to maintain their mission. “We are feeding more and more people every day,” Mr McAuley told Marlborough News Online.  “That’s just the sad situation we find now in the UK.  The model we operate relies very much on local people providing the food, and we want to encourage them to do that. “It has been a lot of hard work to develop our network.  And the reason it has been successful is because it is about local people, not a big national organisation that steps in, but food banks run by local people and supported by local people. “We just co-ordinate everything.  Obviously we make sure systems are in place so that people can be reliant on food banks.  It’s all about giving them short-term support and finding them solutions to problems.” He denies reports that some food banks have run out of food due to the pressure of demand, pointing to failures in appealing for — and collecting food — as the more likely reasons for any failures. “I don’t want to stir up a frenzy that all food banks need food,” he added. “That is not the case.  Most of them are running pretty well and the supply chain is working.” A major TV news channel has revealed that Prime Minister David Cameron visited a food bank in his own constituency of Witney, in Oxfordshire, but only a basis that his presence was kept confidential. “We also invited him to come and see one of our food banks in order to get a national perspective, but he declined our invitation,” revealed Mr McAuley. “We said he could go to anyone he wanted and that if he didn’t want the media involved we could arrange a private visit for him.  But he didn’t want to become involved. “We are one of the biggest thorns in his side a the moment, though we haven’t set out to be Mr Cameron’s thorn. “He sees us as part of his Big Society but we have been going for 13 years, long before the Big Society was ever mentioned.  It is unfortunate now that these words, the Big Society, have become twisted, abused. “He had an opportunity to visit.  He didn’t come.  That’s fine with us.”