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Every evening without fail volunteers from the Street Food Project hand out hot meals they have prepared themselves to those most in need. No questions are asked of the ‘guests’ or ‘customers’. It is just a necessity and their needs are great.
Why ask more questions when there is already such a stigma in having to rely on foodbanks to feed your family? Why ask about their hardship when most of us are one or two bills away from being at the receiving end of a food parcel?
Cornwall Live visited the project to speak to some of the amazing volunteers who make it happen day in day out and why the hoped-for end of the current pandemic won’t sadly bring an end to poverty in West Penwith any time soon.
There are bags of food in the room where we meet Penzance’s Street Food Project volunteers Martin Venning, Stephanie Downing and Maria McEwen, ready to be picked up or delivered to some of the families and the single men and women who rely on them.
Tucked away behind the Royal Mail depot in the heart of Penzance, the project is low key and hard to find. There is no big neon sign advertising what it does. Yet its role is of vital importance to the hundreds of people who would otherwise go hungry today or tomorrow if it were not for the initiative.
“There is a mix of people who come through the doors,” Martin, the volunteers coordinator with the project, said. “That hasn’t changed. It’s the volume of people who come to us that has changed. More people need us than ever.”
Penzance like many areas of Cornwall is heavily reliant on hospitality jobs. While the Government’s furlough scheme certainly helped keep the wolf from the door for many people who would otherwise have joined the dole queue, Covid has meant the tourist season has been much shorter this year.
For many in the sector, while the shorter tourist season was busy, it is the holiday park and hotel owners who have recouped their money when workers have seen their hours cuts as a result of the pandemic.
“Many seasonal workers didn’t benefit from the furlough scheme at all,” Stephanie said. “80% of people’s wages is nice but it’s simply not enough when you’re already struggling on 100% of your wages.”
Martin, Stephanie and Maria all share one thing in common when it comes to their involvement with the project. While not wealthy themselves, all want to see their community thrive for the many, not just the few.
“Feeding people is an amazing connector,” Martin said. “It really does give you a great sense of community. When you cook for someone not only do you ensure they have food to eat that day, but you offer them a small amount of care and dignity. You help them feel human again. Not subhuman.”
Martin, who also helps to organise the Golowan Festival, has been involved with Growing Links, the not-for-profit umbrella organisation for the Street Food Project and others for several years. He started off as a volunteer and when the project founder Lynne Coakley Dyer made a successful bid for more funding, he started working on bringing in more volunteers.
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“I have a strong belief in working towards a fairer society,” he said. “I worked with refugees in the ‘jungle’ in Calais on three occasions, including in January this year.
“I was very active in Bristol before I moved back to Penzance three years ago. As a city it has a very down to earth community. I knew that the Street Food Project was part of Growing Links and decided to help serve food to those in need.”
Martin was part of Stephanie’s team at first, serving meals in the evenings before leading the Sunday team.
The Street Food Project operates seven days a week, serving on average 30 hot meals every evening out of its base at 1 Guildhall Road.
It also hands out between 60 and 100 food parcels a week to people in need including homeless single men now staying in some of the homeless pods at Long Rock, to families whose jobs don’t pay enough to heat their home or put food on the table.
Service users, or guests, are either referred to the project by Cornwall Council, their GPs or other organisations such as Addaction (now known as We Are With You).
“I know what it’s like to be homeless,” Stephanie, who currently works for Tempest Photography, said. “I spent several months couch-surfing at some friends’ house in my late teens and I don’t know what would have happened to me if it hadn’t been for the generosity of these friends and their parents who took me in.”
Stephanie joined the project three years ago, the year Cornwall was blanketed in snow for several days, at a time when food was being served outside a building near Penzance train station.
“Suddenly there were people who would normally be driving in from Sennen to serve food to people who couldn’t make it because of the snow. I could carry stuff down to the station easily so when a friend asked for help that’s what I did.
“It’s not nice to see so many people come in regularly but I guess we can also keep an eye out for them and make sure they are all right. It’s nice to hear of the happy ending stories when people who we have helped turn a corner and get themselves sorted.”
The Street Food Project, which was set up in 2015, is one of three such initiatives in Penzance including Food For Families, a food bank offering support for families in need in the Penzance area and the foodbank run by Churches Together.
“There isn’t much overlap between the three of us,” Maria, who ran the Pop Up Penzance project and became a driver volunteer when Covid put her out of work, explained. “If there is a glut of demand somewhere we will of course all help out but generally we tend to have our own area to cover. We’re too busy trying to keep up.”
Half of the fresh produce consumed is donated by local supermarkets in Penzance (Mount’s Bay is from the Lizard to Lands End) for whom it is a way to reduce food waste. It is then prepared by volunteers into meals and given to ‘the guests’. The rest comes from donations from the community, including very often from the volunteer cooks, drivers and servers themselves.
“We’ve had to work quite hard,” Maria added, “to make sure the end of day supermarket food moves through the building quite quickly. People come with their own pans of food they have prepared at home to serve out of the project here.
“But in the Covid lockdown we had to change the way we operated and delivered food to people instead. Many of our volunteers are elderly or started shielding so we have had to recruit more volunteers to bridge that gap.”
“We’ve literally had to jump over hedges to deliver some of the food to people living in tents in fields,” Stephanie added. “It’s certainly had its challenges for our volunteers.”
While numbers fluctuate throughout the year, the project is run by a small army of up to 150 such volunteers.
“Many of our volunteers are struggling themselves with low wages and free school meals,” Stephanie added. “But they are the people with this strong belief that if we all do our bit we can make a difference to our society.”
In some corners 2021 is already being lauded as a possible boom year with full economic recovery, a full blown tourist season and mass vaccination that could put Covid behind us for good.
“I’m not sure that under the current economic circumstances, things are going to change that quickly,” Maria added.”But Street Food Project will be here for those who need us as long as we can keep the funding and the food coming in.”
The Street Food Project is running a crowdfunding campaign to raise more funds and as a way to encourage more people to who would like to give their time to come forward.
The Crowdfunder link https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/growinglinks—street-food-project-food-store
