Thursday, 25 April 2013

Our Volunteer Day




On 25th April 2013, Staff from United Biscuits and Jacob’s in Liverpool were invited to a ‘Team Volunteer Day’ with FareShare who are based in Hunts Cross, Merseyside.


Why us?

United Biscuits (UB) is a manufacturer of biscuits, savoury baked bagged snacks, biscuits for cheese and cakes through their Companies McVitie’s, Jacob’s & Carr's and are a founder supporter of the FareShare organisation.
UB pays FareShare £5,000 a year in support but due to the long shelf life of their products do not give them a lot of product, unless there is an exceptional situation where they have produced something that they could not sell but which is still absolutely safe.
Keen to build upon this relationship, they invited us to go along, help out and see first hand the work they do.



Who are FareShare?



To quote from their official Twitter page @FareShareUK UK charity fighting hunger and food waste by rescuing surplus food and getting it to people in need.”

Volunteers go out in vehicles packed with crates of food and deliver to women's refuges, homeless shelters and other similar organisations in the city.  

Their Merseyside branch can be found at @faresharemersey

For more information and details on how to Volunteer or Donate visit their website www.fareshare.org.uk/


Our Day

After introductions, inductions and a tour of the depot, it was down to work.  Two of our team jumped onto the van to help the driver with the deliveries.  The four of us who remained in the depot got down to sorting out the boxes of food donated by Manufacturers, Supermarkets and the general public courtesy of food-drives.



The majority of the stock comes in on pallets but, as we found out, there are also huge cardboard boxes filled with anything that a Supermarket may stock.






It was one of our tasks to sort through 2 of these boxes, putting similar items in crates by weight and documenting how many crates we’d sorted.  Each item had to be checked for damages such as ripped packets or dented tins and also by Sell By or Best Before dates.  Later, the number of crates we had filled would be inputted onto a database to make picking for the next days deliveries easier. 





It was a dirty (and sometimes sticky) job but somebody had to do it and well, that’s what we were there for. 

On a break with other volunteers

There were a number of other volunteers there, whether they wanted to be or not! We learnt some of these may actually have been carrying out community service.
Whatever their reasons for being there, they all worked very hard and worked well as a team.  They got the job done without any complaints.  Credit deservedly goes to them.

It was certainly a day of mixed emotions.  Shock at realising just how many organisations rely on charities such as FareShare.  Disbelief at realising only 1% of surplus stock goes to the likes of FareShare but overall satisfaction at knowing we did our bit to help out even if it was for only one day.

And Finally...

A short poem pinned up on the toilet wall...