'We wanted to be part of the solution' - The Sheffield church feeding thousands during coronavirus crisis

The iconic Sheffield church started a foodbank in late March, the week after the lockdown began and just days after their conferencing and catering business went bust as the coronavirus crisis took hold.

The operation has now grown so much that around a third of the emergency food deliveries that have taken place in the city during the pandemic have come from St Mary’s, and the amount they provide is growing all the time.

Vicar, Claire Dawson, said running a foodbank was completely different to the way the church has operated in the past, but that the demand for their services had left them in no doubt it was the right decision.

She said: “Our funding stream was based on conferences and catering but that disappeared and we had to get rid of all our staff. That business used to pay for our lights and our heating so we have felt the effects of the pandemic as well - but we also wanted to be part of the solution.

“At the start of the lockdown there was an immediate issue of people not being able to get out but now it is a family’s employment situation and economic hardship that is going to affect them more – and it is only going to get worse.”

The boxes St Mary’s deliver to places like Fir Vale, Arbourthorne and Gleadless contain all the staple foods essential for healthy eating including bread, butter, milk, pasta and cereal - as well as other necessities such as toiletries.

Prepared meals cooked by the foodbank’s chef are also included but the main emphasis is on fresh produce, leaving each crate looking like a trendy veg box you might order from a local greengrocer.

Claire said: “Most of the food we get comes from the FareShare scheme so it would otherwise go straight into landfill from the supermarket. We even got 300 chickens one day.

“But we try to ensure that people are given as much fresh food as possible. Just feeding somebody baked beans and white bread for 16 weeks wouldn’t be good.”

As well as Claire, community development worker James Starkey and director Graham Duncan, the foodbank also has a chef and a team of voluntary staff drawn from both the church congregation and the wider community.

At the beginning of the pandemic they were sending out fewer than 100 boxes a week, but James said they were now providing more than 260, feeding around 900 people in the process.

He said: “People and families have been getting referred to us by organisations like the Citizens’ Advice Bureau and even schools – so it has grown considerably during over the last 16 weeks.

“Schools are often aware of the employment statuses of parents and may be concerned that the income of the household will have been reduced by redundancy. And for large families, there is the additional strain of having lots of kids around the house and needing to eat more.”

The foodbank’s volunteers are a wide mixture of people, from students to furloughed workers and even some who have previously worked at St Mary’s and have come back after being made redundant.

Tom Cribb, from Ecclesall, is a student at Glasgow University and has been working at the foodbank since April.

He said: “I got involved in order to do something productive during the lockdown rather than just play on videogames.

“Where I live everyone has a garden and there are lots of green spaces nearby but lots of the people we deliver to are living in small cramped houses with no outside space.

“There are also lots of single-parent households as well – when we deliver to them they are really grateful.”

And Kate Whitmore from Broomhill began volunteering at the foodbank after she was furloughed from her job in training and development at the beginning of the pandemic.

She said: “Making up these boxes makes you think more about people in the city and what they might be going through.

“So, rather than put the same things in every one, you can tailor them to different families and think want they might be able to make with the contents. It makes you put yourself in their shoes.”

Preparing another box to be sent out to a needy family, Claire said St Mary’s has a long history of providing food to those in need, and even ran a soup kitchen during the First World War.

But she is keen to stress that the foodbank is only a temporary measure and she would like to see the church return to a less passive way of helping those in need.

She said: “We don’t want to be a foodbank forever – I don’t think it is either sustainable or desirable for us to do that – but the fact there has been such demand is an indication that the economic and social hardships are not going to go away.

“I think we’d like to continue to do work around food but we want to develop it into something more - maybe a pantry where people pay to be a member and use it like a supermarket so there is less stigma.

“Foodbanks have become necessary evils in many respects, but when there is a lot of poverty around we know that there is a need there that is not going away. What that is going to look like in a couple of months or years we don’t know.”

You can donate to St Mary’s Covid response appeal by texting STMBLCOVID plus the amount you are giving to 70460 or by buying flour from their Bread of Sheffield website at www.breadforsheffield.org.

Editor's message: Thank you for reading this story. The dramatic events of 2020 are having a major impact on our advertisers and thus our revenues. The Star is more reliant than ever on you taking out a digital subscription to support our journalism. You can subscribe here www.thestar.co.uk/subscriptions for unlimited access to Sheffield news and information online. Every subscription helps us continue providing trusted, local journalism and campaign on your behalf for our city.