“We run a membership club where members are guaranteed a food box every week. We get them out to about 60 families each week – they’re the people most in need.

“Membership is £6 per week, but the boxes are filled with at least £40 worth of food. What we’ve learned is, you need to make sure they’ve got food for 4-5 days.

“We don’t ask for a lot of information from people – it’s hard enough to ask for help without taking them through the rigmarole of forms, but people are referred to us from schools, social services, police and the like.

“You get to know who needs what in the community. We’re all volunteers, we all live locally, so we know the community.

“We’re helping all sorts of people – older people, single mums, families, it’s generally working people who can’t make ends meet. We cover all of Blackburn now but the area that we originally set out to help is one of the most deprived areas of the town.

“People tell us they couldn’t survive without the food boxes. Some of the stuff we’re able to give people is unreal, it’s such good quality. People can’t believe it would’ve been wasted. But because FareShare’s quantities of food have dropped back we can’t have as much at the moment. They can’t give what they haven’t got.

“Naomi and FareShare are fantastic with us, though. Naomi put us forward to have extra allocations when the need went up in our area because another group nearby shut down. And if any other CFMs don’t collect their allocation, Naomi knows she can call us and we’ll never turn food down. We make sure it all gets used.

“We’ve been doing this for four years now. It shouldn’t be happening in 2024 but it’s great that we can do something. Now we’re feeding anyone and anybody.

“We got the shop a few weeks before lockdown so we had to go straight into just giving out food boxes. Once lockdowns were lifted we turned it into a community shop, like a mini supermarket of goods that are just close to the best before date. We’ll travel the country finding the products that are as cheap as possible and we then sell them at a reduced rate, we’re maybe 25% cheaper than the supermarkets. We do cleaning products now and some homewares like duvets.

“Its’ different people using the shop to those who get the food boxes. but everything goes out in the same bag, whether it’s bought goods or food boxes, to remove any stigma.

“We meet all different community’s needs too. We have a warm hub, a community playgroup, we do free pre-loved school uniforms, and run loads of events for families.

“We run a knife crime awareness course too, in partnership with the JJ Effect. They’ve delivered that in hostels, colleges, schools and we’ve paid for it. We also have the only knife amnesty bin in Blackburn.

“It’s FareShare that makes this all happen because we know we’ve got that food coming in each week. The food for the food boxes is what grew everything and got us established with our community.”

Alan – Big Local, Blackburn

To protect privacy, images show volunteers from other community groups supported by the Food Redistribution Centre.