Barrow Foodbank is honoured to receive the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service. This honour recognises the hard work done by all our volunteers in Barrow, Millom and Ulverston since we opened on 23rd July 2012.
Our volunteers fill a number of roles to ensure the foodbank is run efficiently and complies with statutory legislation while ensuring those that attend the foodbank are made to feel welcome while giving them nutritiously balanced food to last 3 days. These roles include:
- The trustees who are responsible for the governance of the charity.
- Our church representatives who encourage their congregations to donate food and faithfully bring it into the foodbank on a weekly basis.
- The supermarket volunteers who help during our Tesco food collections and are seen standing in Tesco asking their customers if they would like to donate food.
- Our drivers who collect food from the various collection points and take the weekly allocation of food to our centres in Millom and Ulverston.
- Our warehouse volunteers, who weigh all donations coming in, date and sort the food, and ensure good stock rotation.
- Our centre volunteers, who welcome clients, offer them a drink and cake, biscuits or toast while they wait their turn to collect their food.
- Our site volunteers who do all the maintenance while others do cleaning.
- Volunteers who ensure we meet all environmental and health and safety policies and standards.
- Since we opened our volunteers have fed a total of 32,492 people of whom 13,327 were children and 19,165 adults. We have also given out £45000 in fuel vouchers as a Fuel Bank.
None of this would have been possible if it were not for the communities of Barrow, Millom, Ulverston, Dalton, Grange over Sands, Cartmel and other areas across South West Cumbria who have donated a staggering 275.4 tonnes of food!
The Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service is the highest award given to volunteer groups across the UK to recognise outstanding work done in their own communities. Any group carrying out voluntary work that provides a social, economic or environmental service to the local community can be nominated for the award. Each group is assessed on the benefit it brings to the local community and its standing within that community. This is a most prestigious award and is the equivalent of an MBE for individuals. Ann Mills recently attended an event at Buckingham Palace in recognition of the award and we will be honouring all our volunteers at an event on 10th June.