Foodstuffs South Island’s Community Trust has provided a $10,000 grant to local charity Full Bellies to help feed school students in north-west Christchurch who have been coming to school without lunch.
Full Bellies works closely with schools, packaging and delivering healthy lunch bags for students in need so that children can learn, participate and be fully engaged at school.
Foodstuffs South Island Community Trust* has provided the charity with $10,000 worth of New World and PAK’nSAVE vouchers, enough to provide local schools with over 1,000 school lunches a week during Term 3. The funding has made it possible for Full Bellies to add another two primary schools to the 15 they already support.
Part of Foodstuffs South Island’s purpose is to help feed the South Island, and one way the co-op does this is through its Community Trust, which supports communities across the South Island in numerous ways, including providing people with access to healthy and affordable food.
Chair of the Foodstuffs South Island Community Trust, and co-owner operator of PAK’nSAVE Papanui, Lucy Boock, says the Trust provided the grant to support the amazing work Full Bellies provides to the community.
“Foodstuffs South Island has a clear purpose to feed the South Island and create successful communities, and that begins with having access to healthy, nourishing food,” Lucy says.
“Our co-op and Full Bellies share the goal of supporting our community and providing access to healthy and affordable food, and this is just one of the ways we can make a tangible difference to the families and kids who need it most.”
In 2022, seeing the need in her own community, Full Bellies founder Kate Pauling started making lunches from her home kitchen for children at the primary school her kids went to. The idea came following a coffee catch up with a local school principal who told her about the growing number of kids in the area who came to school without food and were finding it hard to engage and learn at school. Most of the schools in the area don’t receive government funding to feed students, so Kate decided to do something to tackle the issue, making lunches to feed six students each week, all from her own pocket.
“At Full Bellies we believe every child deserves to be empowered to reach their full potential, and by providing our food bags, we are breaking down barriers in our community,” Kate says.
“We’re really grateful for the grant provided by Foodstuffs South Island’s Community Trust to allow us to continue helping families and children in our community that need us.”
Two years later, and as a registered charity, Full Bellies receives funding from various businesses and community-minded individuals and provides over 1,000 lunches a week, with the help of 150 volunteers who either provide home baking, prep and pack the lunches, or deliver them to schools every Monday and Wednesday during the school term. As well as running the charity, Kate pitches in, delivers school lunches before starting work in the morning.
Almost half of the 150 volunteers are bakers who regularly drop off freshly baked goods to the team. Other volunteers then prep and pack the lunches at the Full Bellies premises at 5am on a Monday and Wednesday. Once the lunch bags are ready to go, a team of drivers arrive onsite to collect and deliver the lunch bags to partner schools for students to collect before the beginning of the school day.
Each week, volunteers prepare and package a huge amount of food into the lunch bags: Over 1,000 bread rolls, apples, bananas and pears, 10kg of cheese, 7kg of carrots, 20 telegraph cucumbers, 7kg of whole carrots, 15kg of ham, 15kg of chicken or pulled pork. Full Bellies spends around $16,500 on ingredients each month. The lunch bags provide students with enough food for a whole day, including breakfast, morning tea, lunch, and a little something for after school.
Kate says they’re already seeing the positive results of their efforts, including a fall in the truancy rates of students who now receive a regular lunch bag.
“We send each of our schools a survey on child truancy rates and our results show that attendance rates have improved by 9 percent overall since we started providing the lunches,” says Kate.
Foodstuffs South Island is proud to be helping make a difference in local communities.
For more information about the co-op’s Community Trust, visit https://www.foodstuffs-si.co.nz/foodstuffs-community-trust
