Norwich foodbank: Update 232

Thanks to Rachel’s ongoing contact with ‘mash man Deane’ (yes that’s how we refer to him now!), we received a HUGE donations of instant mash last week, in 4 flavours – butter, cheese, garlic and nutmeg. I accidentally ripped a pack of nutmeg mash so we made it up (purely for non-waste / quality control of course) and I have to say it was absolutely delicious. I took into the Partners meeting (alongside normal refreshments of course) and those who tried it, also enjoyed it. I definitely expected not to like it so there’s a lesson in pre-judging there I think! What I haven’t shared, is that the entire donation was from a French arm of Deane’s business and so it all needed re-labelling in English…  Rachel printed the translations and we had a brilliant team in on Friday afternoon (including two one-off volunteers from a local care home who had offered their time at just the right moment!), unboxing, labelling in English and crating up mixed crates ready for packing into food parcels. We’ve also shared the mash stash with Yarmouth and Gorleston foodbanks so spreading the love.

We had a stall at the Aviva Marble Hall building last week as they were doing a promotion of their new in-house catering service and had us (as a charity) alongside vendors sharing new products that were going to be available. We had a small amount of donations over the week and we attended for one day to engage the staff there and have since had a few offers of team and individual volunteering which we are hoping to utilise to support us at our upcoming supermarket collections. We regularly get contact from teams in Aviva offering a half or full day of volunteering so it was good to thank them generally for their support and engage with new teams and people.

I expect some of you took part or attended to cheer on those running in the Run Norwich 10k on Sunday? As previously mentioned, HM Treasury have chosen us as their charity of the year and a few of them ran for us. Well done to Julian who I know ran it and indeed anyone else who did!

For several years, Chris, Joyce, Barbara and others have been running very successful plant sales, with money raised often coming to us as well as other local charities. Following the latest sale, we received £650 which goes some way to showing how successful the events are! It really is a labour of love throughout the year, to have plants ready for the various sales and they must be brilliant as many of the same people come back and re-stock or try other plants, as well as new people passing by or seeing the local adverts. We are very grateful that they continue to support us and I know ‘they’ include some of you lovely lot so thank you personally!

We are going to be in the Original Charity Christmas Card shop once again this year (opening mid-October) and have already filled the rota with big thanks to Jacqui, Jean, Jules and Lesley  Thank you also to Brian, Liz, Teresa and Greg for helping narrow down our card choices this year. See attached a picture of this year and last year’s combined (what we had left from 2024) and if you want to make any early orders, let me know…!

Newsletter:

Our latest newsletter went out by email on Tuesday this week (9th September) so if you didn’t receive it and would like to, please do email [email protected] and we can make sure you are on the list  We send these out quarterly and while some of the news is included in these Friday updates, there will be other bits too so please do let us know if you’d like a copy.