Solar panels for our refugee food bank

You haven’t heard from us for quite a while… we were busy trying to keep our heads above water. Current trends are putting pressure on those left standing, but we are rowing against the current.

All these months, we kept running the food bank in Chisinau, driving food boxes to Odessa, organizing an intense wave of vocational courses and supporting Ukrainian food entrepreneurs.

Since the conflict broke out in our region we’ve served about 45 thousand families. Our food bank has been distributing over 20k lbs of food a week for 2 years. Most of it, fresh produce from local farmers. The summer and fall were wonderful. In the winter the diversity is certainly limited to several types for storable fruits and veggies as well as canned and pickled stuff or dried fruits. Sometimes we also sprinkle in much appreciated dairy and a few basic staple foods.

We’re quite proud we’ve been able to make this work with „zero waste”. All the recipients bring their own bags and boxes, so we’ve prevented tons and tons of plastic and cardboard trash.

Watch interviews with regular food bank visitors here: https://fb.watch/qt_DvB2XFT/

The interest and commitment of people and organizations worldwide to support Ukraine crisis have been gradually fading. Some got burned out, others shifted their attention to other more recent problems in the world… Most refugee support centers here in Moldova have closed or drastically scaled down. We’ve been getting countless messages and calls from people, sharing concerns and asking if we’re also going to disappear.

Not yet… Especially now that we are THE ONLY food bank in Moldova that still provides weekly food supplies at scale. In order to keep up the volume of food for 2000 families per week we have to operate in a leaner form now. Starting next week, we’re giving up the central deposit and office in the center of Chisinau and shifting to distributing the same amount of food in public places across the city as we did at the very beginning of the crisis.

Another rewarding branch of activity we have firmly established in the last half year are vocational culinary courses. Many Ukrainains are slowly taking roots here in Moldova, looking for jobs or re-skilling opportunities. From basics of culinary arts, over pastry to the charming raft of barista, we have trained 75 people so far in intense 2 month courses. Some of them have found jobs or started their own small scale production in our commercial shared kitchen.

And next month we’re launching the next vocational program for women – to learn basics of construction and repairs. This profession is already quite in demand, and it will be so much more, when the mess is over, and people need to go back to rebuild their homes, factories and hospitals.

This is our gradual transition to offering „fishing rods” instead of “fish”, because as much as we love to provide fresh local food to those in need, we know this cannot last forever.

Thank you GlobalGiving and all our individual donors for being a strong wind in our sales since 2 years.

Links:

• https://fb.watch/qt-eSGNY6G/
• our work to support refugees in Southern Ukraine
• longest standing food bank for refugees in Moldova