People’s Kitchen Update

At 10am, every Tuesday since 2018, the doors to the cafe would open, crates of surplus food chosen and sorted, chopping boards, peelers and aprons distributed, and the soon the space would be a-buzz with chatter, clatter and carrot peel. By midday all the prepped food would have been whizzed upstairs via our clanky dumb-waiter, to be transformed by chefs into a nutritious, free hot lunch for our community, then served up at 1pm to around 20-25 lovely regulars from all over Walthamstow and Leyton. Extra meals boxed up and labelled, to be distributed by bike to people who need them.

Bringing people together through food is a huge part of what we do, and People’s Kitchen has been an anchoring point of our activities. The conversations and connections, the care and the cultivated sense of belonging have become woven into the fabric of The Hornbeam, so much so that we continued to run the project beyond the end of specific project funding, for some time! Sadly, the maths of paying a chef and facilitator eventually stops adding up.

A cost that was also becoming unsustainable is the additional staff time spent supporting or trying to help address the often complex needs of community members welcomed into the Hornbeam’s safe and free space, who are often facing challenges of their own during an era of underfunded mental health services, stretched council budgets, inadequate and expensive housing, the loneliness crisis, poor health, grief and unstable geo-politics. Yes of course we signpost, and are proud to have close working relationships with so many of the hard working Voluntary and Community Sector organisations and LBWF’s teams and branches of community services. Everyone is doing a lot, with very little.

After much reflection we have come to the decision to downsize our People’s Kitchen offering. It is such a crucial community connector that we will still be welcoming people to help prepare and eat lunch together on the last Tuesday of the month, from 10am to 2pm. Chop and chat from 10, lunch served at 1pm. Spaces limited to 20 people max.

At first we were hesitant to share the realities of the challenges and changes, but we believe in transparency and being honest about the realities of running community projects that rely on funding. Many thanks!

The Solidarity Supermarket -Unpacked

As the clocks have gone backwards, food preservation and winter readiness are on people’s minds. What better time to launch The Solidarity Supermarket? 

This venture is a reworking of the food pantry formerly situated at Stafford Hall, funded by Peabody delivered in collaboration with Queen’s Boundary Community and The Hornbeam Centre. Our partners in the QBC area identified a need for a bulk buying co-operative aimed at the Asian congregation at St Barnabas. They raised funds from The LBWF Food Innovation fund and will be reinventing the project to involve a chicken coop and opportunities for young people. This is a great legacy for The Pantry, but why stop there?

As the Cost of Living Crisis reaches its third year, we had to ask ourselves: Is there more we could do around Food Security in Walthamstow? Can we give people more dignity and choice? Can we make sustainable, ethical food available to all regardless of income? Can we do this with minimal funding!?

And thus, the concept of the Solidarity Supermarket was born. Using co-operative principles that adhere more to ideas of mutual aid than philanthropy, this initiative combines elements from the pantry model with the concept of bulk buying to reduce packaging and cost. Our tiered pricing structure means that those who can pay a little more than cost price can enable those who are unemployed, on means tested benefits or feel they are on a low income to buy Suma wholefoods at a discount.

Shoppers can buy as little as they need without paying the premium often associated with purchasing items in smaller packages. 100g of sea salt cost just 9p! Solidarity pricing for organic turmeric would be 77p for the equivalent of a jar at the supermarket. That  much less than the non-organic equivalent at Tesco which retails at £1.

We will continue to use some of our food surplus supply to stock the supermarket and sell these items using the system we used for the pantry. The food is arranged on tables with items priced in points. This means we are not attaching a specific value to items that are being donated to the food hub. The payments contribute to stock costs. As with previous iterations of the project, we are using a generalised approach to pricing in order to share out high value items in a fair way. There is also the bonus freebie table with food that is near expiry and needs freezing that day. 

We are asking a solidarity price of £6.00 or a pantry price of £4.50. This can then be supplemented with the packaging free, whole foods and a small selection of household products sold by weight. Profit will go towards buying more stock and overheads.

We are being furnished with a good supply of quality fruit and vegetables from City Harvest and The Felix Project. In light of this, we intend to start accepting Healthy Start Cards as soon as possible.

We are happy to take donations of bags, big kilner jars for herbs and spices, fruit and veg from allotments and are keen to recruit more volunteers to make this a community space. We are building up the stock slowly in line with our storage capacity, so we are also keen to hear what items you would like to see in store.

If you want to know more, donate or volunteer, please get in touch with volunteering@hornbeam.org.uk

Food Partnership

We’re part of an exciting new development for Waltham Forest - a blossoming Food Partnership! A food partnership is an alliance of people, organisations, local council members and food businesses who want to help build a better local food system for everyone. There are some fantastic examples of Food Partnerships around the UK - see the Sustainable Food Places website for more on this.

Here in Waltham Forest, the food partnership is made up of 2 main networks: the Food Resilience Network (FRN), made up of local food aid organisations, and the Food Growers Network (FGN), made up of local food growers. There’s potential for more - a small food businesses networks, a community meals network, or even networks for community composting, backyard poultry feed or scrumping.

The incredible work that these network members do is helping to create a better food system for everyone. By coordinating these networks, sharing resources and providing support to members, we aim to create a linked up, localised food system.

Multiple factors are compounding the current cost of living crisis, with Covid and the war in Ukraine exposing the fragility of our international food supply chains. Global heating is already making itself felt in higher olive oil, sugar and wheat prices, those high costs being pushed throughout the system, making all our food shopping more expensive and severely impacting the health and security of our most vulnerable community members.

Robust, localised food networks help our community build towards food security and food sovereignty. As the Food Partnership continues to develop we will share updates and invitations on ways to get involved.

Call Out to all Growers, Gardeners, Fruit pickers, Foodies and Foragers!

Summer is upon us and as the seasons shift, fruit, vegetables and herbs will be growing in abundance over the next few months. Every year usable food in our neighbourhoods goes unpicked; or there ends up being so much that gardeners don’t know what to do with it. 

The Waltham Forest Food Partnership are organising an initiative this growing season to get under-utilised fruit and produce to community food projects tackling food poverty and the cost of living crisis: reducing our carbon impact and building power and resilience in the local community at the same time. By strengthening ties between local food growing and mutual aid systems we are taking another step closer to food security and food sovereignty in Waltham Forest! 

Our questions to you: 

Do you grow food?

Do you know someone with a fruit tree in their back-yard you could speak to?

Do you know a spot where herbs are growing in abundance?

Where is the best bramble patch to pick heaps of blackberries?

Do you know somebody who works in a food business ? 

If you can answer YES to any of these questions, get in touch!

We will also need a team of  volunteers to help with picking, collecting, storing and distributing surplus produce. So if you have some time to spare on a sunny afternoon, would enjoy cycling a swish electric cargo bike, take pleasure in making jam, or have ties to a community space, school or food projects in your area that could receive and distribute produce, we want to hear from you! 

If you have any ideas or contacts to share, please get in touch with us at outreach@hornbeam.org.uk