November 2024

Supper’s Up served up a hot meal with extra warmth to mark World Kindness Day on November 13th.

Our weekly soup kitchen served a vegetable soup using a recipe from Harraby Community Centre, a member of our Food Redistribution Centre, as groups from across our network joined in with The Cumberland Building Society’s World Kindness Day celebrations.

Ingredients were paid for by our partners at The Cumberland, as part of its ongoing Kinder Kind of Kitchens initiative. It followed the publication of the Kinder Cookbook over summer, which has compiled recipes and stories from dozens of the community groups and charities we supply food to, to promote their work.

Naomi Winter founded Supper’s Up soup kitchen in May 2024 after seeing the rapidly rising need across Preston through her work as CFM Coordinator for our Food Redistribution Centre.

She said: “At Supper’s Up, kindness is exactly what we serve up. We feed anyone who comes through our door then help them in whatever way they need – giving them the clothes or supplies they need, inviting them back for ongoing support from one of our programmes, or signposting them to additional help in the community.”

“We were able to set up our soup kitchen partly thanks to funding from The Cumberland so it’s was nice to be part of another Cumberland initiative.

“The soup we served was warming, tasty and nutritious. It was also a way for us to connect and build trust with people in need, to show them that there are people out there who care and want to help.”

Supper’s Up offers food, community and opportunity to people in need, welcoming hundreds of people to its base on Essex Street every Wednesday evening. On November 13th, it was visited by more than 100 people who shared dinner and took home extra food, clothes or toiletries, as needed.

Other groups supplied by our Food Redistribution Centre also took part in the day’s event, serving soup and handing out gingerbread cake in their communities; including Intact Centre in Preston, Waste into Wellbeing in Kendal, and Harraby Community Centre in Carlisle. Staff at The Cumberland’s branches in Preston and Kendal also joined in with the event, offering free soup to customers and asking them to ‘pay the kindness forward’.

Kelly Ashbridge, External Communication Manager for The Cumberland Building Society, said of the event: “We’ve been so inspired by the stories and recipes that CFMs in the Kinder Kitchen network shared with us for the Kinder Cookbook earlier this year so we wanted to commemorate them on World Kindness Day by serving them in our communities.

“It’s been rewarding to be part of giving something back – the reaction has been amazing. Serving up kindness has got people talking, and we have been asking people to pay that kindness forward and be kind in our communities.”

The Cumberland has been supporting our food redistribution work since June 2023, giving more than £500,000 to be shared between our member groups and also help to sustain our work as we deliver millions of meals to communities across Lancashire and Cumbria every year.