Counting carrots, packing potatoes, and tossing tomatoes

As the UK weather slowly edges into Autumn, we’re swapping out our outdoor, conservation CSR days for something less weather-dependent.

During the Autumn and Winter months, we’re delighted to spend our CSR afternoons helping out at local community food banks. And we’ve found none so welcoming as the lovely team and fellow volunteers at Bow Foodbank.

Our line-up for this September CSR day was myself, James, JT, and Amira.

James was coming back fresh-faced from his wedding in Scotland last week, and we welcomed Amira back from her travel adventures across Bali and the Philippines.

For this session, Amira was in fact just travelling down from Liverpool. But by the time she arrived (about halfway through the session…) she might as well have travelled from South East Asia.

The excuse presented was “they’re filming the new Batman film in Liverpool today, so the trains are delayed.”

Cue many jokes for the choice of Liverpool to represent the desolate, crime-ridden, depressing streets of Gotham City…

The Morning Shift

Before Amira graced us with her presence, James, JT, and I were busy doing the real work. Counting carrots, packing potatoes, transporting tomatoes, and stacking cereal boxes.

Two weeks away celebrating in Scotland seemed to have hampered James’s ability to count, so it was up to JT to keep the correct tally of various fruits and vegetables.

During the morning shift we tallied up over 1,000 apples, 2,000 carrots, a hundred cereal boxes, and MANY tomatoes.

Tomatoes happen to be my least favourite food item, so I was particularly glad when this shift was over…

After a few hours of hard manual labour, Amira finally decided to show-up… just in time for lunch!

Lunch

A company schism was quickly created over the choice of restaurant for our break. James and JT opted for the local pie-place. Amira and I opted for sushi.

After a quick waddle around the local park to walk off our lunch, or in James’s case, double-pie and ‘liquor’, we headed back for our afternoon shift.

The Afternoon Shift

With the team finally at full strength, we spent the next hour finalising the food packages, and using the hilariously-slow lift to transport fresh deliveries, before the food bank officially opened to welcome visitors for the afternoon shift.

Amira was quickly relegated (I can only assume this was performance-related…), to stock-counting. Yours truly was tasked with ‘shopping’, which involved collecting food packages and handing them out to the food bank’s clients.

Whilst James and JT… quickly ran away for ‘an important business meeting’, and disappeared for a good hour.

This happened to coincide with the busiest hour at the centre, with Amira scrambling to tally up stock, and myself running around ‘shopping’ like something out of Supermarket Sprint.

Luckily, we had a stash of donated, off-brand ‘Red Bull’ from Bangladesh to keep us buzzed…

6pm eventually rolled around, as Amira and I flopped down exhausted, and James and JT… finally returned from their ‘important meeting’ 😅

Jokes and hijinks aside, it was a wonderful, fulfilling session at the food bank.

Throughout the week our efforts help contribute to:

320 adult food parcels and an additional 154 kids’ parcels for families with children. We
also sent an additional 25 food parcels to Youth Services.

This included:
– 16 new guests
– 54 asylum seekers
– 10 guests living without housing
– 7 guests living in a refuge
– 59 guests requesting extra support (energy vouchers, benefits, housing, debt concerns etc)

Each guest received a core food bag, as well as additional food, cleaning, hygiene, period products and baby items.

We moved 2.6 metric tonnes of food, pantry and hygiene items; the same weight as 4,261 Basketballs!

London and Community

In these times of increasing uncertainty, we see a lot of negative press portrayed about London across social media channels.

Socials seem all ablaze with scenes of racial and social tension; giving you the impression London is totally on fire.

But this session was a good reminder that, quietly in the background and far away from all the influencer posts, there’s good people from all walks of life, and all racial backgrounds, doing their bit to keep London together.

London has its problems, let’s not be not naive about that.

But maybe if instead of jumping on ‘X’ to complain or fan flames, everyone took one occasional afternoon to help out in their local community, we might just find ourselves in a much better place 💚

Thanks for reading,

Chris

PS. Want to see a quick video of our antics? Check out the link here 📹