Perhaps that should have read Hope+ in the news; since we do seem to have been, certainly in the Liverpool Echo quite a bit of late. Our latest appearance relates to Hope+ having helped set up a pilot with our partners FareShare and a Dublin based charity called Food Cloud, which having been run in Ireland for twelve months, transferred to the United Kingdom last year, with Liverpool being chosen as the first pilot area. The idea is to both help organisations working to alleviate food poverty, but also to help large supermarkets cut down on the vast amount of perfectly good food, which is “wasted” at the end of each working day.
The scheme works via an app developed by Food Cloud, which allows a supermarket to inform a local charity, usually a different one each night, what surplus food is available. If the organisation can make use of what is available, they respond by sending a simply text, and go and collect it from the store. Using the app, Hope+ has been receiving upwards of sixty kilos of perfectly good food, mostly bakery and fruit and veg every week from Old Swan and Park Road Tesco. We are only able to do this thanks to our indefatigable volunteers, who are prepared to go and collect the food during the late evenings. Our guests very much appreciate being given not just fresh bread, but fresh bread from the in-store bakery, as well as treats such as croissants and doughnuts. Finally, a thank you to everyone who made a special effort to support this year’s WashDay16 scheme. It has been wonderful to have some grown up treats such as nice shower gel to hand out alongside the Easter Eggs for our younger guests. A special thank you to Dianne Rothwell and Clare Kerrigan for donating the tea and coffee money from the Dean’s Lent Lectures, to our WashDay16 collection; and to Everton in the Community and St Julie’s RC High School for their enormous donations of Easter Eggs.
