A Sheffield food bank is calling for donations of money – after demand for food parcels trebled in five years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rachel Smith, who is in charge of Burngreave Food Bank, explained how since the start of the Covid pandemic the demand for food parcels had doubled from 20 to 40 every week. Following the cost of living crisis last year demand had increased even further.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She said: \u201cSince the food bank started in 2012, there was a steady increase and that seemed bad but then obviously during Covid it just shot up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBut then the cost of living crisis hit and it went up even higher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cLast year we got up to about 60 food parcels, so it sort of trebled.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Burngreave Food Bank has had to change how it operates due to this surge in demand, and now works out of larger spaces to cater for the increase in customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ms Smith said it now needed funding to pay for support to help those in need out of poverty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She said: \u201cWe are facing quite a big fundraising need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe are trying to support people with the issues that are driving them into food banks in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIf you can help people to the point where they don’t need to use food banks then actually that’s the biggest win of all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt is worth a lot more than a bag of food.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are multiple ways to donate money to Burngreave Food Bank including setting up a direct debit payment, using Paypal or via the food bank\u2019s Just Giving page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ms Smith said: \u201cAt the moment we are buying about 60 per cent of the food we give out, donations are only covering 40 per cent of it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Volunteers said that although they had seen numbers of people using food banks drop off this year, the recent news of the benefit cut will potentially have a massive impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ms Smith added: \u201cIt usually disproportionately affects people at the bottom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cPeople who are already struggling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cA lot of the people who use the food bank are people that will be in that category.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The food bank also explained that Tesco had been a massive help to food banks over the years, as they have donation points where members of the public can donate food.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Sheffield food bank is calling for donations of money – after demand for food parcels trebled in five years. Rachel Smith, who is in charge of Burngreave Food Bank, explained how since the start of the Covid pandemic the demand for food parcels had doubled from 20 to 40 every week. Following the cost […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":215,"featured_media":54958,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[191,343,5,10,132,4],"tags":[742,73,756,328,886,12,887],"class_list":["post-54912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-charity","category-finance","category-news","category-politics","category-top-stories","category-top-story","tag-burngreave","tag-charity","tag-cost-of-living","tag-covid-2","tag-food-banks","tag-sheffield","tag-trussell-trust"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shef-live.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shef-live.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shef-live.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shef-live.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/215"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shef-live.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54912"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/shef-live.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54963,"href":"https:\/\/shef-live.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54912\/revisions\/54963"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shef-live.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shef-live.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shef-live.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shef-live.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}