Spiralling food prices mean The Daily Charitable Trust is asking for help to continue to provide lunches to schools not eligible for government-funded meals.
Spiralling food prices mean The Daily Charitable Trust is asking for help to continue to provide lunches to schools not eligible for government-funded meals.
The cost of living crisis is a double whammy for organisations providing for those in need in the community.
Spiralling food prices are causing headaches for those providing help and mean there are likely to be more people struggling.
Under a Ministry of Education contract, Te Puke’s The Daily Charitable Trust provides free school meals to most of the eligible schools in the district. It also offers free pre-cooked family meals that are available for distribution to those in need in the community.
The trust extends the meals-in-schools service to non-eligible schools by ploughing profits back into the scheme and providing them with meals for some of their students.
However, rising food costs have trustees concerned.
“Food costs have just blown out in the first three months of the year, just with inflation, particularly as we do high protein and vegetable meals. Those are the categories of food that have gone up the most. Plus, we do it in such high quantities,” says general manager Chrissi Robinson.
“This year we had a budget for 250 unfunded school lunches a day that go out to schools that weren’t chosen for the ministry contract.
“That adds up to about 40,000 school lunches over a year. We also do over 600 family frozen meals per month, so that adds up to about 8000 meals for people in need in our community.”
Chrissi says the trust had budgeted for a normal inflationary increase, but the amount by which food costs have gone up “is mindblowing”, and she is asking for the community’s support.
“We are in the space that we really want to keep up the level of provision that we are doing because the need is still there.
“We are no longer getting Covid-related funding supporting that, and also it’s costing so much to do.”
“It’s different to a business model because [there] you just pass on price [increases] — in a charitable model you don’t have that ability.”
The trust has started a Givealittle page for individuals wanting to help.
“We are also interested if people want to investigate sponsoring some of our lunches or any businesses or organisations who want to chip in to help us cope with the inflationary increase while we get our head around how we are going to handle it sustainably to get us through this rough patch, so we don’t have to slip away with any supply.”
The Daily Charitable Trust provides about 600 frozen family meals a month for distribution in the community.
The situation is likely to be compounded with the same food inflation that is causing concern for the trust also meaning demand for meals could increase.
“We are getting requests on a weekly basis from the schools that we provide our charitable meals to for extra amounts of lunches because either people move into a position of needing them, or families in need are moving into the area, so it’s not going to decrease in the short term.”
The trust is carrying out an internal review to make sure food is going where it is most needed.
It is also working with local agencies such as Poutiri Trust and The Hub Te Puke so once people have received the help they need “in the moment”, they can get help longer term.
