Come Dine with me – Bedford Community Larder
Oakray understands the importance of being involved directly involved with the communities we deliver to. We are proud of our reputation of delivering positive social value initiatives which make positive differences where it matters. We offer all staff paid volunteering opportunities throughout the year, and last week Alison Howard, one of Oakrays surveyors used her volunteering day to help this worthy local cause. Please see below for Alison’s feedback.
Yesterday it was arranged that I would spend the day with a charity local to me called ‘Come Dine with Us Community Larder’. It is aimed at the homeless and families that are struggling to manage – especially at the moment ☹
It was set up in 2015 and aimed at homeless, families in poverty and ex-soldiers suffering from PTSD. They have no sponsorship and are not supported by any church or large organisation. They rely solely on donations from supermarkets
On Saturdays they provide hot meals, drinks, sandwiches and fruit and Tuesdays and Thursdays they have a social supermarket which is what I helped with yesterday.
Volunteers were coming in all day with collections from various supermarkets locally, and the food was then sorted out into frozen, fresh etc, priced at pennies, then put on the shelves ready for today
They also had an area in the shop for a school in Bedford, that seems to have a lot of families that are struggling to feed their children, so they do a separate arrangement for them, whereby a large portion of the food goes to them and gets collected by a volunteer from the school
This was like a look at another side of Bedford that I had never seen before (luckily for me) and made me appreciate that sometimes just a wrong decision or an unfortunate twist of fate can make such a huge impact on people’s lives.
I enjoyed it immensely but have to say it was hard physical work!!
