Volunteering

These are the staff members of The Food Bank, I say staff members, all of these guys volunteer their time to help out those who are in difficulty. My dad is on there, he’s second from the left in the green t-shirt.

So there has been a lot in the news recently about the Food Banks, but for those who don’t know much about it, I’ll sum it up using their website:-

‘13 million people live below the poverty line in the UK.
Every day people in the UK go hungry for reasons ranging from redundancy to receiving an unexpected bill on a low income. Trussell Trust foodbanks provide a minimum of three days emergency food and support to people experiencing crisis in the UK.
In 2012-13 foodbanks fed 346,992 people nationwide. Of those helped, 126,889 were children. Rising costs of food and fuel combined with static income, high unemployment and changes to benefits are causing more and more people to come to foodbanks for help.’

The Southport Food Bank, which has been open since May 2013, has helped around 1600 people, including nearly 600 children. I’m really proud of Dad for giving up his time to help, and they really do need volunteers…especially since the majority are over the age of sixty and can’t lift much, so things get sorted a lot slower. All I can say is that people in Southport have been very generous with their donations, something that all the volunteers are very grateful for.

I ended up going into the Food Bank today to take some photographs for Dad, so these are the volunteers, at the back from left to right we have Richard, Dad, John, Richard, Linda, Karen and the two at the front are Irene and Carol. I then got asked to go and take some pictures in Barclays, who had collected money and food for the charity.