'Incredible' response to Elgin City manager Gavin Price's Feldy-roo project supporting isolated Perthshire residents during Covid-19 lockdown
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DID you hear the one about the Keith football fan helping Elgin City’s manager to provide a valuable lifeline to isolated Perthshire folk during the Covid-19 crisis?
It’s one of the amazing stories that has emerged from the Feldy-Roo food delivery service set up by City boss Gavin Price in his home town of Aberfeldy while life is in lockdown.
With football put on hold and his Fountain bar and restaurant temporarily closed down, Price channelled his efforts into setting up a project in support of the people in his town who most needed it.
One evening he served up 10 free meals for elderly residents in Aberfeldy. The next day the orders were doubled, then again the following day, before a huge fundraising effort helped take the scheme to hundreds of homes across the community.
“I had a suspicion that people might want to get involved eventually, but I didn’t expect it to scale up the way it did. It’s just incredible,” he said.
“We changed it from an evening delivery once a day to a morning and evening delivery. People are getting a newspaper, a soup and a cake in the morning and in the evening they were getting a meal and a dessert, which is where we are now.
“It has just kind of snowballed. There’s nine different restaurants and cafes in the area all involved and well over 100 volunteers now. There’s 15 different routes twice a day and we are doing well over 400 meals a day now, which is quite amazing.
“It’s not just food getting delivered, it’s the social contact that we’ve got with people twice a day. Particularly in some of the rural areas where people during the lockdown genuinely hadn’t seen anybody.
“It’s been a lifeline to a lot of these residents.”
There’s even a Moray influence in the project, not just through Price’s position as Elgin City boss.
His Borough Briggs employers offered their own support by donating club merchandise, which has been donned both by volunteers and residents.
And with the Aberfeldy Co-op store providing free food to the scheme, Price met with store manager George Mitchell and discovered his Moray roots.
“I picked up on his accent and it turned out he is actually from Keith. So I made sure I got him dressed up in an Elgin scarf and Elgin top and got his photo taken at the Co-op.
“I think he is getting a bit of stick from people back in Keith when they saw it on Facebook.
“It was his birthday this week and he’s a big Aberdeen fan so we got a message from (Dons legend) Neil Simpson wishing him a happy birthday and congratulating him on what he’s been doing for Feldy-Roo and Aberfeldy folk.
“He was delighted.”
Now Feldy-Roo is serving up well over 400 meals a day to people across an ever-increasing area of Perthshire.
"We started off in just Aberfeldy but it soon started stretching out," Price added.
"It’s quite a rural population so we are going ten miles out to the west where there’s five or six villages, and two or three weeks ago we started going the other way as far as Ballinluig.
"So it’s quite a large area we are covering and it’s all running quite smoothly."
Price is delighted by the reaction Feldy-Roo is getting from the residents who are receiving food as well as some treasured interaction, which he says is proving to be a rewarding experience for the voluntary force doing their rounds.
"The feedback has been amazing and it’s probably spurred everybody on, all the volunteers to want to do more.
"For them it has brought a bit of structure to their day, what is going on and getting them out of the house to do something positive.
"It’s been ready good, it has brought the community together in a fashion I would never have believed before. Businesses working together that wouldn’t normally, different generations of volunteers all working together and building friendships.
"It’s been a real positive thing for Aberfeldy for the town and the area and it’s getting a lot of recognition which is well deserved. It’s helped spread the word even further."
What has allowed the project to spread as far as it has so far is the goodwill of local donations and various streams of grant cash being sourced.
"We’ve raised over £110,000 now through various grants, local businesses and people getting involved. The gofundme page alone has raised over £25,000 from local people.
"It’s pretty amazing from what started off quite a modest, innocent idea to where we’ve gone to.
"Not one volunteer was ever asked to get involved, it’s always people who have knocked on the door asking if they can help.
"It has shone a good light on Aberfeldy as a community and it’s something that will probably be remembered for many years to come, how positively the whole town has reacted to it."
Price himself had had to take on different roles on a weekly basis to ensure the project runs efficiently and gets the vital supplies out to everyone who needs it.
"I was obviously very hands-on at the start to get it going. Now it takes a lot of administration to organise the meals every day, organise the kitchen and co-ordinate all the routes that go out.
"We do a diary on Facebook every day so it’s almost a wee book being written.
"I have found myself in a 9-to-5 job now for seven days a week but it’s been enjoyable at the same time, it’s occupying the mind."
One thing that Feldy-Roo has helped take Price's thoughts away from is football, with the sport being firmly in limbo right now.
His club Elgin City is one of many in Scotland whose future has been left uncertain due to the shutdown, with no revenue coming in and wages still to be paid.
The government furlough scheme has helped Elgin out by covering 80 per cent of club salaries, yet there still remains doubt over how long the system will continue to do this, and for how long clubs can survive.
"The football, frustratingly there’s not much I can do with that," Price said. "Even the planning part is difficult just now, we don’t know where the club is going to be.
"In terms of contracts we can’t make cast iron offers until we know what the financial situation is going to be or what the time scale is for the club."
