Auckland City Mission's Christmas food parcel phone lines jammed, 42,000 calls in one day

Wednesday, 16 December 2020

Helen Robinson from Auckland City Mission says mission staff are distressed by the numbers of people they have not been able to help.

Auckland City Mission says it is worried about the unmet need of the city’s most vulnerable after one of its distribution centres for Christmas food parcels logged 42,000 calls in one day.

Papakura Marae is one of the five centres working with the mission to feed Aucklanders this Christmas.

In previous years, whānau have queued up overnight to be first in line for a parcel of food and presents.

“There is no dignity in that,” marae chief executive Tony Kake said.

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That has been replaced with a phone system, where people call to be assessed and are given an appointment slot to pick up their parcel.

It was a massive improvement on people sleeping in their cars in the hope of getting some food, the mission’s Helen Robinson said.

Papakura Marae has been transformed into a distribution centre, working alongside the mission.

“But we are equally distressed by those we have not been able to meet the need of.”

There were thousands and thousands of requests for help that they had not been able to answer, she said.

Families will receive a standard food parcel, plus presents like these teddy bears, and the ingredients for a Christmas meal.

On Wednesday afternoon, the mission said its Christmas phone lines were down “due to the unprecedented and extremely high demand”.

In a post on its Facebook page, the mission said it was not taking new requests as staff worked through the requests they already had and called people back.

Demand for the mission’s standard food parcels is sitting at double what it was in February. During lockdown, staff reported weeks when it was triple what they used to manage.

But they have not been able to bump up the number of Christmas parcels they are giving out this year. The mission had already been working at full capacity this year, Robinson said, and the infrastructure just was not there to do any more.

Across the five sites, 8500 parcels will be given out this Christmas.

But Kake said if there was funding and support available, they could easily give out double or triple the parcels they were handing out this year.

Inside the marae, toys and presents are marshalled in lines along trestle tables, labelled by age and gender so they can be given to the appropriate family.

Every family with children under 16 will be given a present for each of them, as well as a box containing enough food for three to four days.

The other end of the hall is stacked with sacks of onions, enormous bags of carrots, boxes of bananas and crates of capsicum.

Scurrying volunteers pack the fresh vegetables, meat, dairy and dried staples like pasta and rice into cardboard boxes.

With the mission’s Christmas lunch cancelled this year because of Covid-19 concerns, the food parcels have been bolstered with the ingredients for a festive meal: chicken, kumara, gravy and dessert.

There will still be five smaller lunches happening across the city but they will cater for about 600 people rather than the 1600 who were fed last year.