A SCHEME to launch a Foodbank for residents in need, solely in Westbury and its adjacent villages, has received a £5,000 boost.
Members of the town’s area board approved a grant application by trustee of the new organisation working on the initiative, Ian Cooper, who said the money would fund capital expenditure such as shelving, furniture and the creation of a website.
Currently the town is served by the Warminster and District Foodbank, which is operating a telephone service due to being closed under Covid-19 restrictions. There is also the Westbury Open Food Project which operates out of the Crosspoint charity’s office in the Market Place and the Community Fridge at Crosspoint, which has been shut throughout the national lockdowns.
The plan for the new facility was previously outlined to the town council, when Ian Cooper, a current Foodbank volunteer, said though the affiliation with Warminster worked “pretty well,” the Westbury arm did not really have a say in operations or involvement with the board of trustees.
“We’ve noticed the scale of the need is such that it should be possible to operate a scheme serving solely Westbury and the adjacent villages,” he told the area board. This is a brand new organisation, we’ve formed a board of trustees and will be applying to the Charity Commission to form a charity to run the Foodbank. When the charity is set up, it will subsume the work of the Warminster and Westbury Foodbank and the Open Westbury Food Project.”
They would be seeking new accommodation and needed somewhere accessible for people, in or around the town centre, and ideally with as few food deliveries as the charity could manage, to reduce attached costs, Ian Cooper explained.
The organisation would also be applying for funding from Wiltshire Community Foundation and was confident that existing donors would continue to support the scheme.
“Over the last few months we’ve been serving 40 food parcels a week to the local community and we are talking about 60 to 80 adults and a few less in terms of children,” Ian Cooper said.
“We hope that in the fullness of time we can also provide a signposting service for anyone in need.”
Proposing approval of the grant application on the proviso that charity status is completed, cllr Gordon King said, “As a Crosspoint founder I am really pleased to hear this on a number of levels – firstly, the freeing of the food responsibility will free Crosspoint up to deliver what were its purposes at the beginning, and secondly, because I think it’s brilliant that local citizens are standing up, making decisions and taking responsibility to form a new charity to deliver services for those who need them.”
Cllr Russell Hawker seconded and the other board members, chair cllr Carole King, and cllr Suzanne Wickham, were also in support. Cllr Carole King asked Ian Cooper, “Do you think the previous initiative didn’t reach the villages as much as you hoped to?”
Ian Cooper replied, “The time we’ve been living through, I feel there’s an unmet need that we hadn’t yet identified. If we can get the new organisation up and running as we would hope to, we can make sure that we reach out to anyone in need, even if they’re reluctant to come forward.”
