City Missioner: Demand for food parcels triples

Wednesday, 1 April 2020

City Mission Foodbank co-ordinator Nicola Williamson delivering food boxes to Christchurch's eastern suburbs during the coronavirus lockdown.

The Coronavirus lockdown is driving an increasing demand for donated food, charities say.

Christchurch City Missioner Matthew Mark said a significant number of Canterbury residents who had never needed its services before were seeking food parcels.

A thank you note left for City Mission volunteers in the window of a food parcel recipient.

'Because of the changing dynamics within our community, by the end of Friday we had a 305 per cent increase in demand for the foodbank from the previous week,' Mark said.

'That's obviously pretty significant and it creates issues for us.'

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Christchurch City Missioner, Matthew Mark, said some people over 70 were seeking food parcels for the first time because of the lockdown.

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One concerning emerging trend, he said, was requests for food donations from people aged over 70.

'We are increasingly seeing elderly people who have never contacted us before, and who don't have a financial need to use our service, but they don't have that support environment around them to meet that need as their food supply is dwindling,' he said.

'They are not financially strapped, but they just can't get food to their door.'

Different hubs of staff and volunteers had been created for different tasks in the supply chain. Staff were delivering food parcels to vulnerable people in non-contact deliveries.

The owner of a fruit and vegetable shop in Westport says he's having to let $25,000 dollars worth of produce rot, despite his best efforts to give it away to people in need.

'We have isolated areas into bubbles, we don't cross those bubbles at all, and different bubbles have different tasks that are undertaken with the end task being food parcels delivered out into our community,' said Mark.

The mission was 'able to meet the need' for donated food at the moment, Mark said, but it was 'proving challenging' now that physical donations of food from the public were no longer allowed.

'So we are having to buy goods, which creates a financial pressure for us,' he said.

'It also creates a challenge in how to meet the demand on our teams.'

The deliveries might be non-contact but people still showed their gratitude.

'They leave a thank-you note on the door or the family waves out the window,' said Mark. 'It may be at a safe distance but the message still gets through.'

The Salvation Army said over the past six days it had seen a 'notable increase' nationwide in people asking for food parcels.

But New Zealanders had given generously - donating more than $850,000 in response to a call by The Salvation Army for donations to meet the growing demand on its foodbanks. Its online foodbank had been well supported.

Captain Gerry Walker, the Salvation Army assistant territorial secretary for mission, said it was 'incredibly grateful to New Zealanders who continue to show the true spirit of kindness'.