F OOD SECURI T Y
FEEDING GARDENS Gareth Griffiths talks to community volunteers about growing sustainable food feeding schemes
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efore lockdown, 80 per cent of the Cape’s Ocean View community were already living under the poverty breadline, says community volunteer Rashid Davids. “The Noorul Islam Mosque started a weekly feeding scheme in 2014, but at the beginning of lockdown earlier this year, we saw the need for largerscale programmes.
The feedourvalley.org “Kitchen Godesses”.
“We encouraged community members to set up satellite soup kitchens. There are now 72 food kitchens across Ocean View.” The working model established by the Ocean View team in distributing to satellite food kitchens has worked so well that it is being replicated by the City of Cape Town in other communities including Delft, Lavender Hill, Atlantis and Masiphumelele. Sally Berg, the founder of www.feedourvalley.org, which creates and supports feeding schemes in Cape Town’s
FOOD FORWARD SA
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ver the past few months, there has been a significant rise in community feeding schemes. Organisations such as FoodForward SA, which acts as a food bank, has seen a great countrywide increase in demand for their surplus food offerings. The organisation has distributed 5 600 tonnes of food since March this year, compared with the 5 115 tonnes distributed during the 2019 financial year. Andy du Plessis, MD of FoodForward SA, confirms: “In the past seven months we have almost doubled our operations – we
are now in all nine provinces, previously we were only in six. “We’ve also moved to larger premises in Port Elizabeth and Durban to accommodate the increased operational demand.
“We have now set up 12 mobile rural depots that get food to more than 120 beneficiary organisations reaching over 62 000 vulnerable people in underserved rural communities. “FoodForward SA now supports a total of 1 005 organisations, reaching 475 000 vulnerable people, and we continue to receive applications to serve even more,” says du Plessis.
FOODFORWARD SA’s MEASURABLE IMPACT Andy du Plessis
MASI CREATIVE HUB
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southernmost townships via a network of “Kitchen Goddesses”, says the answer to our food security issues is empowerment. “The charity mode is the old colonial way – it disempowers people and keeps them in victim mode. First prize is if you can start building programme or scheme sustainability and then empower the community with skills training, education and provide resources to create community hubs so that people can flourish and begin building microbusinesses and creating employment.”
Masi Creative Hub provides meals across Masiphumelele township.
When South Africa’s national lockdown began, the Masi Creative Hub was already running a feeding scheme for young children up to grade 5 in the Masiphumelele township. Founded by Yandiswa Mazwana, the hub has seven feeding stations spread across Masiphumelele and provides about 1 100 meals per day.
EMPOWERMENT
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2020/11/27 4:00 PM
