As the bus’s driver, Ian Maconochie, says, food banks often ask for vouchers – or “chitties” – before handing out supplies. “Nae chitties here,” he says, “nae chitties.”

Volunteers will happily hand out food for free, though they do ask if people can try to budget each week and make a small donation, say a pound or two pounds. Either way, Maconochie says, no one gets turned away. The number of people that make use of the bus and Centrestage’s other food distribution points is staggering. Between July and September 2018, adults received food nearly 6,000 times and children on about 2,200 occasions.

The other part of Boyd’s role involves helping people to learn to cook so they can better fend for themselves. Centrestage has acquired an old school in Kilmarnock, which in the next few years will be remodelled to become the charity’s headquarters. The old canteen will become a café serving low-cost meals. The assembly hall will be converted into their flagship theatre space. Classrooms will be let out to local initiatives seeking to teach people skills such as hairdressing.

And the old home economics department will be where Boyd organises her cooking courses. The first time she saw the rows of sinks and hobs, she was overwhelmed. “I just burst out crying,” she recalls.

Boyd and her co-workers, along with many volunteers, are trying to tackle poverty in an intentionally holistic way. People’s wellbeing can very quickly be affected by hunger, but that’s never the whole story. So besides the cheap meals and cooking workshops, Centrestage staff and volunteers aim to help with benefits forms, or housing applications or employment issues. The woman bringing her daughter to the bus was right: this isn’t a food bank. It’s much more than that. As Boyd puts it, “We can say, ‘Right, what’s going on? We can help you in any other way.’”

Kerry Wright and her colleagues at CFine in Aberdeen also find themselves providing a wide range of support to local people. Charities like this aim to get under the skin of something much bigger: deprivation itself. Food might just be the first thing that brings someone through the door.

CFine’s chief executive, Dave Simmers, would like his organisation to focus on helping people to help themselves. But the level of crisis he sees people in means running the food bank as well is essential.

“We don’t like food banks at all,” he says, as the workers hand out the food parcels just a few feet away from his office door. “They’re not helpful, they erode dignity, they create dependence and they change nothing.

“But, essentially, people are hungry.”

Wright’s life may have been saved by CFine’s food bank, even though she came to it ostensibly as a volunteer rather than a user. And yet Simmers’s point about food banks being unhelpful makes sense in the wider context of a hungry nation. Improving the fairness of the benefits system and monitoring and safeguarding child nutrition would be some first steps that could move families away from reliance on food banks.

Transforming lives

For Wright, it was working for a food charity that really got her back on her feet, not access to free food. Today, she expresses a true zeal for the job she does. She now works 29 hours per week at CFine. She finally has a steady flow of income. This year, she says, she will become debt-free for the first time in a long time. She’s being very cautious, though. If it’s a bit chilly, she tries not to put an extra £10 in the gas meter – in case it means she gets low on food the following week.

But her children’s physical health is good. They have become more active. Now they play sports and one goes to cadets.

And meeting her at CFine, I get a sense that Wright, like her friend Kelly Donaldson, has found a role that doesn’t just help her in the here and now – it’s something she can build on.

“I’ve got a loyalty to here,” she says. “Because they are genuinely helping people transform their circumstances. That has an effect on physical health, mental health and life situations.”

Donaldson pipes up and points out how Wright is clearly happier now. She gets up every day. Puts her make-up on. Goes to work. That makes a huge difference – for the whole household.

“It does,” says Wright. “It has an impact on your children.”

--

This article was first published on Mosaic by Wellcome and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.

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