Old Kilpatrick foodbank secures future after £90k funding boost

dailyrecord.co.uk:

When Maureen Cummings set up Old Kilpatrick Food Parcels in the spring of 2020 she didn’t imagine she would be using the service herself a year later.Maureen and husband Gordon started helping by picking up prescriptions for people in the village who couldn’t get out themselves at the start of the first lockdown in April 2020.But just a year later Maureen found herself turning to the foodbank for support, after losing her job.Now, at the helm, she has expanded the lifeline which has now fed 20,000 people, opened a warm hub to help those struggling to heat their home and, crucially, secured £90,000 of funding to ensure the service’s future with enough money to pay the bills and buy supplies until 2025.The funding news comes after the service marked its busiest month yet handing out more than 14,000 items of food – including 153 emergency food parcels - in the week leading up to Christmas.When Maureen and Gordon launched OKFP in 2020 they were initially told there was no appetite for a foodbank in Old Kilpatrick, but quickly discovered that wasn’t the case.Maureen explained: “We were told from the get-go that there wasn’t a demand in our area.

Lots of locals said that to us. People said we were wasting our time, but that wasn’t the feeling we were getting.“At the start of the pandemic my husband and I were delivering prescriptions – the feedback was great.

We thought we’d help people get through the summer and then get back to our day jobs.“Since then we’ve had about 120 volunteers come through our doors to help us since we started.

And we’re approaching 20,000 people we’ve provided food for.“It wasn’t our intention when we started helping out.”In 2021, she too became one of those people.Maureen said: “A lot of us,