North East food poverty charity to deliver festive boxes to reduce family pressures
Feeding Families is back with its annual campaign
A food poverty charity across the North East and Teesside are encouraging people to help those facing food insecurity this Christmas.
They aim to deliver thousands of festive food boxes packed with essentials to reduce the pressure on families.
Libby Malcolm is from Feeding Families and she said: "We started off as a Christmas charity. It was where our heart and soul was and we're really proud to support families and households all year round. We work with over 200 partners across the region who are in direct with families and households that might need a little bit of extra support around food.
"We talk about families, we're feeding families, and your family isn't just your kids, it might not be who you live with, it's your community, your network, and we're so blessed to see that everybody can be something. If all you can do is give us a tin of beans then that's great, if it's following us on social media and sharing our posts, it still has an impact.
"I think this year we're looking to support probably around 8,000 households just at Christmas. We realised that we really want to get the right food at really good quality to people as well, so we've increased some of the way we've targeted our provisions to get to those at the really deepest levels of poverty.
"It's about making sure that this Christmas nobody is sitting alone or sitting with their family and they don't have a bar of chocolate that they can have to make it feel festive. We're giving basic food of good quality with those extra festive treats and we can't do that on our own.
"We make the boxes up on scale, we've got a wonderful team of volunteers and we get them out to people who are already connected in the community, so instead of asking people to go to another place and meet another person to receive their food, we make sure that we get the food to where they already are in a way that works for them."