If you donate to food banks..

[Novasmum]

Is it okay to donate activity packs for children and treats for parents such as face masks etc?

I have had a really rough couple of years financially. I lost my home, partner and I split making finances harder too. I am in a place now I am doing better and have regular work. I work with children and would love to put together packs for over the summer holidays and donate to the food bank. I’m just unsure if this is accepted? same with treats for parents, (obviously not alcohol)

thanks!

You sound as though you are from a non ethically diverse area. If your background is Asian or Middle Eastern, lentils will most likely be used whereas many tinned foods will not.

Our food bank requests tinned potatoes and carrots! Lentils are amazing for cheap filling food, all you need is an onion, curry powder and a stock cube for dal

^This

Yellow split Lentils cook in a few minutes. They are a staple in many countries and are often used to bulk out other foods.

I think they have a place in a food parcel containing tined veg / tomatoes and dry pasta.

@ElephantsFart ethnicity my job is dominated by people's ages and childhood/care journey. Their ethnicity is little to no consequence in this situation.

I can see how it would be in a normal family to family scenario though. However in my case, no.

I usually do a packet of biscuits and tea bags.

Not too sure how helpful it is, but I seem to have the same middle class guilt with the tinned soup.

will reconsider next time .

I’m Asian, and it’s true we’re used to it. But it’s still time consuming and a PITA to make if as PP you’re short on electricity, gas, time.

They might not want or have time to look who needs this, could you donate to womens Aid instead,

@ElephantsFart

So,, when you go to a food bank you should fill in a questionnaire about your cooking facilities and if you are struggling with energy bills, an assessment to see if you know how to cook well enough, a chat about your life and what sort of foods fit in with it and a lesson on two on your idea of nutritious food and how to make it?

If you are the right sort of Naice Middle Class Family fallen on hard times, you get The Premium Box, with fresh chicken and vegetables. If, for whatever reason you aren’t The Deserving Poor, you get the Really Poor, Undeserving boxes with pasta sauce and and baked beans. Or, if you give all the wrong answers and are beyond help you get the Not Really Making the Effort or the Poison box, because you can’t help some people.

Didn’t some stupid politician say something similar recently?

Food banks, by definition, will be feeding the lowest common denominator. Not of class of person, but of resource scarcity of EVERY kind, not just food. They don’t have tiers. What goes out in the box has to be actually useful to people with a little, a very little and with fuck all. Some are asking for powdered milk, not UHT, because people
can’t carry it several miles home on foot.

People need what is actually useful to them, today. Not your idea of what’s good for them. Nobody needs food bank boxes going to waste, because they’re full of middle class food they can’t cook. Not won’t bother with, CAN’T. Which is why food banks need pot noodles and breakfast bars. If you can make the choice not to eat a pot noodle because you don’t like them, you have options. If you make the (I suppose it’s technically a choice) not to eat raw chicken that you can’t store in a fridge, you really don’t.

The system is broken. Food banks can’t fix it. They can just given people three days of something to put in their bodies so they don’t starve and have the energy to get up tomorrow. And that’s why they want cheap (so they can help lots of people) long life (no energy to store or defend) minimal prep (because people don’t have the equipment, time or energy) minimal cooking (because people don’t have the appliances electric or gas) food. If that’s not what you prefer to eat, that’s fine. It’s not for you.

People need food they can use, today. What’s that saying about charity giving people what they know they need, not what you think they ought to want. That.

If they are individually wrapped then it should be OK, but check.

Yes and this is exactly why everyone should check what their local bank is asking for rather than donating what they consider "good" for people.

Time poverty is common alongside money poverty as people are often juggling family duties with multiple zero hours contract jobs in their attempts to make ends meet.

The disgrace in a modern, wealthy country is the sheer number of people in work whose net income each month doesn't cover basic costs of living.

OP: As others have said - speak to the local foodbank. If they don't take these items they may be able to point you at women's groups, refuges and play charities for the Summer who will take them for the same audience.

Please don't donate open packets of nappies or random sanitary towels they won't be distributed and more than likely binned .

That's not the message food banks are trying to convey at all (obviously).
If you spend some time looking online at different food banks, many will publish lists of what they need.
Looking at my local one, last week their shortages were:
fruit juice (long life), puddings (rice/sponge), custard, noodles, squash, carrier bags and loo rolls.

The best thing you can do if you are not knowledgeable about how they work is to either donate money or find out what they need, not try and make your own judgements.

Not true, you can ask. I donated packs of opened sanitary towels. They were individually wrapped.

@Eeksteek It's good (or not, depending on your stance I suppose!) to hear someone echoing some of the things I'm saying. Unless you're there on the ground dealing with it, it's incredibly hard to explain to people why donating bags of oats and lentils isn't the 'fix' that they're looking to provide.

It doesn't seem right to me to donate chemical food (packet noodles, tinned soups, processed bars etc) to foodbanks. It might be appealing and easy to eat but it has low nutrition and is not beneficial to health or mental well-being. It's the equivalent of saying, here, you're poor so you can eat poison.

FWIW I run a food bank, on a store model - so people attending choose what they'd like from the selection available. There is a huge huge huge variation in cooking skill, facilities and circumstances among our users - from those who only take instant noodles, bananas, tea bags, jam and bread (when we have those things) to those who excitedly look through herbs/stocks/Gousto excess that we sometimes get and are happy to cook up a plantain, Jerusalem artichoke, pak choi, lentils etc that the supermarkets donate, and educate our volunteers.

Porridge oats are usually popular, for whoever mentioned them.

I gave an opened pack of nappies that were too small to our health visitor - she said they could use them in the weighing clinic for people who got caught short, or they could pass them on to a family in need.

Honestly, I’d probably have been in the lentils-are-cheap-and-good-for-you-just-need…. Camp a few years ago. And I had good friends who helped me see that you need more nutritious food. You need the means to put it in your body.

Not everyone can cook Dahl. If you can’t open a breakfast bar, you need a lot more than a food bank.

Also, please consider that the Dahl-is-cheap-and-nutritious ‘help’ is also pretty basic and universal advise. If someone isn’t cooking Dahl, there’s likely a barrier. This may possibly be that every Hugo, Benedict and Sebastian keeps suggesting it and they’ve have Dahl five days out of seven for the past three months. It’s unlikely to be that they’ve never heard that unique little gem of yours before. Sorry.

People have lovely intentions. But real help needs more than that. It needs knowledge of things as they are, empathy not to judge and willingness to provide an actual, not a ideal solution.

Apologies, OP. I’ve derailed you a bit. I hope you understand.

Our local food bank often asks for nappies (unopened packs) particularly in the bigger sizes. As far as I know they take unopened sanpro as well.

People often give away opened packs of nappies on my local facebook mums group. They generally get snapped up fairly fast.

@Novasmum

See if you have a local Home-Start charity. I volunteer at one and we often have donations of nice toiletries which we give out to our mums. They particularly love face packs etc which they often can't justify the cost of. They may take the activity packs too!

A perfect example of why money is often more useful. If the only coffee in stock was the £4 one, they could have sourced the 80p ones elsewhere tomorrow, if you’d given them £4.80 instead. And if tonight, someone had given them a pallet of coffee, they could have bought tea tomorrow. Or if not, they could have gone to wholesalers and got the same coffee at 60p a jar and bought 8 jars of coffee with your £4.80 instead of 6.

I know it’s lovely to give things, not money. But again, it’s about putting people’s needs before your own feel good factor or preferences if you want to really help them, rather boost your own well-being (no, there’s nothing really wrong with that either.) It’s just that there comes a point where not ideal, becomes less useful and eventually useless and stuff goes to waste. And no one wants that. Especially through lack of real understanding of what is needed. I’m glad people have never experienced it. It’s awful. But if people want to really help, they need to put their own preferences aside.

Ah, it was this one.

'We're the kind that give people what they know they really need, not what we think they ought to want.'

And this one

‘Charity ain’t giving people what you wants to give, it’s giving people what they need to get’

As ever, Terry Pratchett got it right.

I haven't read the while post but I thought I'd drop a post I wrote on a similar thread last year about what's used/useful in our foodbank if it helps anyone...

Our foodbank (Trussell franchise) has given out the following over the past few months:

Cleaning spray / anti bac spray / disinfectant cleaner (Flash, CIF and the likes)
cloths/scourers
washing up liquid
laundry liquid

Shampoo
shower gel / soap
tooth brushes / toothpaste
(all above for men/women and kids)
deodorant
handwash
hand sanitiser
disposable masks
san pro (we get given loads and asked for very little)
nappies

baby food - jars/pouches - not formula milk
cat and dog food

in addition to the usual food parcel which contains:

Cereal
Soup
Beans/Spaghetti in sacue
Tomatoes/Pasta sauce
tinned vegetables
tinned meat / veggie equivalent
Tinned fish
tinned fruit
rice pudding / custard
sponge pudding (or christmas pudding)
biscuits (be that a plain rich tea or a christmas selection!)
pasta/rice/noodles
tea/coffee (smaller packs/jars appreciated!)
long life juice
uht milk
jar/packet sauces
chocolate/crisps/snacks (which include christmas selections/eager eggs or whatever comes in)
jam (not homemade - sorry)
milk powder (not baby milk)

We cannot take bottles of alcohol but will take things like christmas pudding with alcohol in it,
We cannot take baby formula.
We have to throw away anything more than 3 months out of date in normal times - currently it is anything out of date at all.
We have to throw away open packets - or anything which might appear tampered with or is homemade - such as home made jam or is a food product which does not have a use by date.

Our particular bank is usually overrun with beans, soup, pasta and san pro!

I thought I would post this up as there are lots of similar posts - but I would say please check with your local foodbank - most have a internet page / facebook page if you are unsure. Remember most foodbanks do not have paid staff and volunteers only work a few hours a week so will likely not have time to phone you back over a christmas pudding!

Ours would. They take new socks, underwear etc, toiletries and makeup and pet supplies etc too.

As @Longmoorlane says food banks accept toiletries so maybe you could donate some shampoo and conditioner sets, nice shower gel or soaps, or tea / coffee and biscuits making the biscuits a bit higher end?

My local foodbank posts most weeks on local facebook saying what they're currently short of. I try and make sure I buy a few items on the list when I do a big shop at the weekend - both our supermarkets have collection boxes so its really easy to do so. But I'm also lucky enough to have a bit of spare cash, so give them a monthly direct debit as well. As of this week, they seem to be very short of tinned fruit, jam and rice pudding, but also shower gel, toothpaste and toothbrushes. Next week it might be entirely different!

We have an informal and well-used food donation box in the village (no referral needed, just dip in if you need to). They can’t take food past its BBE date but otherwise they accept toiletries, loo rolls, sanitary ware, nappies, I’m not sure about toys though.