Hawera's Kai Kitchen Trust talk a sustainable community and disadvantaged children at meeting in Patea

The Kai Kitchen Trust want to help the communities where they support disadvantaged students to sustain themselves. Photo/ Bevan Conley

The Kai Kitchen Trust held a meeting in Patea on Friday to meet members of the community who are passionate about ensuring that disadvantaged students are well fed.

The Hawera-based Trust takes recommendations from third parties and provides disadvantaged or poverty-stricken children with free lunches.

Founder of The Kai Kitchen Trust, Rochelle Steer, said they began taking lunches to Patea in term one this year.

"We don't go looking for places to help, we had a social worker come to us from Patea and tell us that there was a need for a particular family," Steer said.

"We took that information, approached the school and now we are looking after three families there."

The Kai Kitchen Trust started out as a branch of The Koha Shed in Whanganui, but is now Taranaki-based, serving lunches in Hawera, Patea, Opunake and Eltham.

Stratford might be next, but Steer said stretching their services made delivery a problem, so another goal was to help the communities sustain themselves.

"In Patea, we'll try and source within the community as much as we can and what they fall short on, we will provide," she said.

"For example, if they get bread donated every day, but they don't have anything to go on it, we will provide the protein for the bread."

The Kai Kitchen Trust was born out of an incident following some generosity.

"We had started giving out food to people who were struggling, we had a family take some food from us and they tried to barter it for something else," Steer said.

"We saw them do it online and we knew that we had to come up with another plan of how to get food to children."

They took the idea to Hawera Primary School who were keen to get on board and Steer said they started with 12 lunches on April 22, 2015.

"It has become pretty bad, we're making 78 lunches when we start back on Monday," she said.

"Every school has an issue whether they want to admit it or not, people are struggling to live off the money that they're getting."

Steer said although they sometimes struggle in their own community, they will continue to do all that they can in surrounding areas.

"If there's anyone in Whanganui that stands up and says they want to be a part of this, I'm more than happy to talk to them so they can sustain it in their community," she said.

"Sometimes it's not a nice thing to do, we spend a lot of time with these kids and know some quite well - to watch them go through some real tough times is quite heart-breaking."