As need increases and demand for support grows, this County Durham food bank is acting as a beacon of hope in its community. Kayleigh Fraser went along to see how it all works and find out more about how the trust is helping the area.
The East Durham Trust in Peterlee is a well known organisation amongst all in its community. Covering 20 villages and two towns, the trust offers help with everything from food parcels, help with bills, debt advice and community-led support.
Located on Yoden Road, the trust is home to workers specialising in volunteering, financial wellbeing and community facing support, an Arts Café featuring work from local school children and much more.
But, leading up to a general election, we wanted to find out what the biggest issues facing the trust are - and what can and should be done to help those in crisis in East Durham.
Stored in a colourful shipping container in the car park of the trust is boxes and bags of food and amenities ready to be packed and handed out. Everything from new-born nappies, sanitary towels, pot noodles and bags of rice are lined across shelves and can easily be grabbed to put together parcels.
One volunteer, Linda Marshall, 71, has been attending the trust over the past three years. She goes in twice a week as part of the food team, helping to put food into baskets ready to be taken out around the community. She enjoys her role at the trust - but admitted things are getting more hectic.
She said: “We are getting busier because of the cost of living. The demand has been really high – people just cannot afford things.
“Sometimes we get people who don’t have things like kettles, microwaves, so you have to organise what foods to give them which will work. It is sad – this should not be happening in the 21st century.”
A standard food parcel from the trust includes items like cereal, beans, pasta, sugar, toilet roll and coffee and tea to name just a few things.
Volunteers then take these parcels around the community at designated drop off points where those in need would then be able to pick them up.
However, the trust recently had to buy £3,000 worth of food “just to help out” Linda explains, as she admits public donations have fallen.
She added: “All of the shops have just gone up in price. They say inflation is going down but we can’t see it. People just cannot afford it.
“There are people living in Peterlee who are on benefits. By the time they pay their bills, they can’t afford to buy food.
“We get a wide range of people coming in. The elderly, sometimes families with five or six kids. During the pandemic, we had nurses coming in to receive food parcels.
“It just doesn’t matter what job you have anymore. If there wasn’t a food bank, I don’t know how people would survive.”
Chief Executive of the trust, Graham Easterlow, joined the team during COVID and since then has been a driving force to expand both the reach and impact of the trust but has sadly seen the number of people in need soar.
“The amount of people who are coming to us with household bills and are in debt because of that has probably gone up 300%,” Graham said.
“People are coming to us saying they have £4,000 in electricity debt, £4,000 of water debt. We’ve also seen a huge in people who are working and are coming to us for crisis support.”
Graham then went on to explain that this support takes many forms. Whether that is financial support, help with debt or general cost of living support.
Last year, the trust helped solve £700,000 of debt as the number of people needing assistance continues to rise.
Graham continued: “The biggest thing for me is that we’ve seen a huge spike in need the levels of need - the level of need is huge.
“We are talking hundreds of percentage of increase across-the-board. We are hearing from people who are genuinely in crisis - when they ring up there is a bailiff at the door. My officers, my team, they are all hearing that.
“We fed 27,000 people last year and the UK is the fifth biggest economy in the world. In our area, we are feeding a third of our population with crisis food.
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“That is and is should be an absolute stain of shame on our government's policy. My job and our job at the trust is to mitigate the worst effects of poor government policy on some of the most vulnerable people in our society.
“Everybody should be in a position where they can afford to buy things like toilet roll, soap, toothpaste - none of those things are food.”
“When we give out a standard food parcel it does not contain any of those things. We also give out female hygiene products, nappies, baby food. I believe it is only going to get worse.”
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