Photo: Collected
"Hey everyone, there's a food delivery today at 3 pm." "Thanks for the curry, it was amazing!" "I made
pickles this week." "Should we all have an outing somewhere
soon?"
These are the kind of messages that fly back and forth,
pretty much constantly, on Rachel Diamond's phone.
Ms. Diamond is the founder of My Yard, a charity. For each of
the communities she is plugged into, she runs a WhatsApp group, such as the one
she set up in 2018 for dozens of people who live on the Grange Farm Estate in
Harrow, north-west London.
"It not only feeds people, but it also brings the community
together," explains Ms. Diamond.
Many residents on the estate are among the millions of
people in the UK who are currently experiencing food insecurity.
The cost of living crisis has sent demand for food aid
soaring. You'll have heard of food banks but food aid takes many different
forms. Some are less visible than others and, around the country, many people
are now quietly organizing the sharing and redistribution of food themselves.
Often, it starts with a WhatsApp group for friends and neighbors.
When she first started working with the Grange Farm Estate
community, Ms. Diamond found that using a messaging app allowed her to organize
deliveries of food donated by supermarkets and local businesses at the
residents' convenience.
"It was a stigma-free way of people accessing food and
getting to know each other," she says. "For me, it's really, really
special."
Now she has about 20 groups that are swapping messages about
food.
It has helped her keep in touch with those who have dietary
requirements or particular preferences. Some elderly people find that
the price of Spam has gone up a lot lately, so she gets dented tins unwanted by
shops.
Everyone is different, she stresses, asking me to imagine
freezing a supermarket in time and having a look inside every shopper's basket:
"I bet you'd never find two baskets with the same things in. That is
people's lives."
She aims to supply a diverse variety of food that suits
everyone. But due to inflation, the overall need is growing. "It's
devastating," says Ms. Diamond, referring to the cost of living crisis.
On one recent delivery, a van arrived packed with pallets of
food including fresh fruit and vegetables, bread, and yogurt, among other
items. Everything went in about ten minutes, she says. It used to take
noticeably longer. While Ms. Diamond has been running WhatsApp groups for
communities for years, new ones are springing up all the time elsewhere.
Last November, Camille Desprez, founder of Food Next Door,
launched a group for the residents of her block of flats in Brixton so that
they could share surplus food with one another and cut down on waste.
Source:
Online/SZK
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