Community café volunteers busy with meal deliveries
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VOLUNTEERS at an Elgin community café have delivered around 260 home-cooked meals throughout Moray during lockdown.
The Bow, run by the Quarriers’ Arrows Service, has become a hive of community action as volunteers continue work amid the coronavirus pandemic to help stricken locals.
Café manager Hugh Norgate and Moray Food Plus development officer Lindsay Welsh are co-ordinating support from around 12 regular volunteers to conjure up tasty home cooking and deliver these safely to families, individuals and community groups.
The volunteers are delivering home-cooked meals twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, throughout Moray. They delivered 60 meals this morning, taking the total so far to more than 260 meals prepared and taken to community drop-off points in Elgin, Forres, Buckie and Lossiemouth.
Arrows service co-ordinator Marie McDonald said they were keen to find a drop-off and distribution point for people in need of meals in Keith.
The volunteers spend Mondays and Wednesdays cooking up batches of food, with the menus devised by Hugh.
Moray Food Plus handles and distributes donations from local branches of Asda, Tesco, Grahams and Marks & Spencer. This link-up ensures minimal food waste, preventing good quality food from ending up in landfill.
The "food recovery" initiative allows the café to prepare and provide quality meals and fresh baking to people for free.
Marie said The Bow originally looked at offering a takeaway service in the current crisis. She said: "We didn't want the café lying idle just now so we started looking at how we could continue to help.
"Shops were getting more and more stock in due to panic-buying but that has subsided – and now they have a glut so our freezers are bursting.
"It's a significant amount of food that would have gone to landfill."
Marie added: "When you see the amount of good food that's going to waste – and then the people who haven't got enough to get by – it's terrible. We're finding, when you're looking at food and food poverty, it's working people who are in the most need. They just haven't got enough to get by."
The Bow issued a thank-you to Marks & Spencer Elgin last week for a bumper food donation. Arrows said the donation fed 14 families, 10 families with young children, 16 elderly people and people being shielded and 38 single-person households.
The café had been rapidly attracting regular customers prior to the lockdown since its doors opened in February at The Square, 61-63 High Street.
The Bow is an extension of Arrows, which is a Quarriers support service providing practical help for people and their families dealing with substance or alcohol misuse in Moray.
People are being asked to suggest community or voluntary response groups that could benefit from the service by phoning The Bow on 01343 610500.
