Challenges facing the new foodbank

June is a big month for our foodbank here at the Christchurch City Mission.

We are moving out of the old foodbank premises and across the road to our new foodbank building which includes a wonderful new warehouse area. Our traditional model of pre-filled food parcels will continue, but we are adding a mana-enhancing way of offering clients food that they can choose from.

It will be a self-serve foodbank, managed using a points system, and the outcome will be more personal control over food choice, more dignity for our clients.  As part of this new offering we plan to add education around good food choices.

Taking a modern approach to a traditional way of caring for others is very much how the City Mission has over the years been evolving to meet the needs of our community.

Our new foodbank launches with full shelves of products thanks to the support of Canterbury people who bought and donated bags of food through the recent Family2Family campaign with local New World Supermarkets.

This is good news but there’s a shadow in the background we can’t ignore.

A foodbank needs constant food donations, and we are worried we won’t have enough food to operate through the rest of the year. If we don’t get enough donated food, we are forced to buy food and ultimately we can’t sustain that. We are already buying more food now than we ever have.

City Mission’s new self-serve foodbank

A complex mix of stresses and factors has led to this situation.

The Covid pandemic and other global issues massively disrupted the world in many ways including interlinked food chains both nationally and internationally. Food shortages and higher food prices make it harder for us to get food donations from individual donors who can’t afford so easily to buy food for us, and from our bigger bulk supporters who need any food they can source for their own sales or shelves.

Here in New Zealand, a series of natural disasters has exacerbated the problem and brought new stresses to the supply of food. Many of our important food growing areas have been impacted and what food there is, has been rightly directed towards the great need in these communities.

The New Zealand Food Network collects surplus and donated bulk food to distribute to food rescue organisations and charities around New Zealand and is just one of our sources of food. By January this year the network was supplying us with less than a third of the food it supplied a year earlier, and this lower level has continued. It compounds the stress we are under with diminishing supplies of food.

And at the same time that donated food supplies are shrinking, demand for food has soared from families who are struggling with the cost-of-living crisis.  We are seeing people coming to us for help who we have never seen before and that includes working families. Often food comes last in the pecking order of demand on money. When a family reaches breaking point, it usually does so with empty cupboards.

During Covid the Government recognised the hardship being suffered and our vital role in providing relief and supported us with grants to help us buy food. But that extra funding has ended.

In May 2023 we gave out 1442 food parcels which represents 4659 people fed, compared with 1221 parcels in May 2022.  These figures highlight the increased demand.

Recently we have had to increase the limitations on the support our foodbank can give, and it can be heartbreaking for our staff and volunteers to turn people away. All our foodbank clients go through an assessment process to determine their needs and our help aims to get them through a crisis period. But for too many people that period of crisis is stretching for too long. Alongside the provision of food parcels we offer financial wellbeing coaches to help people get back on track and how to factor good food and healthy eating into their budgets.

We need more support than ever to keep our vital foodbank service helping Christchurch people who are at a crisis point in their lives. We are at a very telling time in our 95-year-old foodbank’s history, but I am confident the people of Christchurch will support us as they always have, and I thank you in anticipation for your support.

Corinne Haines
Christchurch City Missioner

This opinion piece was also featured in The Press Wednesday 21st June. Click here to read.