Stop 300 children from going hungry in London

The pandemic has certainly gone one much longer that any of us can imagine and children have had a really hard time of it.

The office of national statistics said that:

'Whilst it’s not possible to say this increase is wholly due to the pandemic, our research also found four in ten 11 to 16 year olds felt that lockdown had made their life worse'

So we've had to get creative.

We designed some workbooks for all children of school age to pick up when their parents do thier shoppping or when we are dropping off food to thier doors.

We called it the Packed lunch Pick up and it has a series of activities that young people can do to increase thier well being, which can be redeem for a healthy lunch from us. Kind of like a work book, but with food.

We've handed out around 50 over the past few weeks, with great success and now coming up with new activities for the remained of this extended holiday.

Some of the next round of funding will go towards our print costs and the rest on the 30 lunches we prepare every week day.

Links:

• ONS report

Over the last 3 months, Be Enriched and Brixton People's Kitchen have been responding to the COVID-19 crisis by delivering food parcels and hot meals to over 200 households per week, feeding over 560 people across Wandsworth and Lambeth. During this crisis we have seen a staggering increase in need, including families with children.

It is no secret that the government's school food voucher scheme, providing families with £15 per week per child had its fair share of challenges. We were also concerned to see that it took an enormous amount of pressure from the third sector to convince the government to extend the scheme over the Easter holidays. 

This week, following campaigns led by young people as well as the third sector, Manchester United's Marcus Rashford joined the discussion to urge the government to extend the school food voucher scheme over the summer holidays. Thanks to Marcus' influence, the government agreed.

While we may not be able to operate our school holiday programming as normal this year due to COVID-19, we will continue to support children and families with food parcels and hot meals. The voucher scheme may be a step in the right direction, but families are facing an unprecedented level of need, and we will be there to support however we can.