Community Meals to Go Kirkcaldy – Going Forward

Back in March, like lots of organisations and businesses, Greener Kirkcaldy had to find new ways of working and running services as a result lockdown. The Community Food Team have a fantastic team of volunteers and we were able to quickly consider how we could continue to support our community access food in a dignified way.

Our Community Meals to Go Kirkcaldy Project enabled us to continue to offer Community Meals to more people by making fresh. home-made food in our community kitchen, and delivering them to households directly. Our Community Chef Iain, having worked in hotels and restaurants, was able to come up with recipes for dishes that we could make in large numbers, and would arrive at people’s homes intact, and attractive to eat. We also spent some time working out safe systems for making and delivering food safely with our volunteers while following public health and Scottish Government Guidance.

This week is that last week we will be delivering Community Meals. We’d like to celebrate what we have achieved and thank everyone who has supported us over the last 22 weeks. This is what we did over the last 22 weeks:

• Delivered 7,400 meals to households and organisations in Kirkcaldy
• Delivered 3,050 meals to the Kirkcaldy Foodbank at Linton Lane and Viewforth Church Hall
• Delivered meals to 100 individual households

We would not have been able to actively support our community without the help of a small staff team, and 12 volunteer cooks and drivers. We are really proud of our volunteers for committing their time as key workers, and ensuring that many households in our community could get some hot, home-made meal direct to their door, on a weekly basis. Everyone got stuck in preparing and cooking food, packing meals, labelling boxes, and dropping off food. We could not have done this as well or as efficiently without them. The Scottish Government also paid tribute to Scotland’s Community Food Heroes back in July too.

We were able to resource our Community Meals to Go Kirkcaldy project thanks to funding support from The Scottish Government’s Supporting Communities Fund, and the Development Trust Association Scotland. We also received support from Fareshare and Yules in Kirkcaldy, who have supplied us with surplus and unsold food, and Fife Council stores at Bankhead who enabled us to access bulk supplies for our meals.

We have had lovely comments from everyone we have delivered food meals to in Kirkcaldy. For many, it has also been a welcome weekly check-in and chat with our volunteers too. All the meal bags had an information sheet with local sources of support too which was updated regularly. We helped individuals, couples, families, older people, anyone who was finding accessing food difficult at this time. We have been delighted also to have been able to supply the Kirkcaldy Foodbank with ready-made meals on a weekly basis as well. This was a welcome addition for their clients – having a meal already made that they could take home and eat straight away.

As many of us are able to be more mobile, and adapt to easing of restrictions, we are now able to launch and plan for other projects that support our community access food and make social connections as they do it:

• We have opened The Lang Toun Larder – a community pantry which aims to support our community to eat well and reduce food waste.
• We are restarting our Community Meals as a takeaway service initially on 15 September. More information to follow.
• We are planning to redesign our weekly sit down meal so that people can come and enjoy a meal in company and safely.
• We are restarting out community cooking classes in small groups.

News about all of these can be found on our website: www.www.greenerkirkcaldy.org.uk