A community pantry in Norton Lees is offering fresh food and aimming to provide warm soup to help people get through hard times this winter.
St. Paul’s Community Pantry in Norton Lees, Sheffield, provides a warm space for those in need to receive free fresh food and hot meals for just £3.
The pantry operates twice a week, from 9:30 am to 1:00 pm, and has been established since April 2023.
Apart from serving free food and drinks, they aim to offer hot soup this winter for people in need.
Tina Sampson-Smith, 59, the organiser of the community pantry said: “We also do things like tea and toast, free teas. We hope to do free soup in the winter. Obviously we have a surplus of bread, so we can have bread and soup.
“We feed the kids as well. We do a breakfast club for the children here in the school holidays, which is well attended.
“We’ve got some laptops. Not particularly brilliant laptops, but they’re useful for people who haven’t got one. They can come do job searches, because the first thing that goes when people are in financial crisis, the internet is a luxury.”
Apart from distributing food in the pantry, they also deliver emergency food parcels to people in community who are unable to get there.
Ms Sampson-Smith said: “I come from a home where we struggled for food when I was growing up, I didn’t want any child to be in that situation. But I can see there’s a big need in this community for that help, that’s why we’re here.
“We set up for two reasons, one is to get rid of food waste, because a third of food you see in the shops gets wasted.
“The second aim was to get people who are struggling because of the cost of living crisis here to have food and that’s a really important thing because families are struggling.”
Over 80% of the food is from supermarkets, and the rest comes from personal donations and a school’s harvest festival.
The community pantry is not only a place to serve food, but also a welcoming place to social and connect.
Ms Sampson-Smith said: “Some people don’t qualify for benefits in that time, we’re there for everybody. We have an open door policy, we have no problems with that. Because we’re not a food bank, we’re a food pantry.
“Which means that we don’t have the constraints of the trust, for instance, it has strict rules, and they’ll only help people for a certain time. We’ll help people for as long as we need to.”
An anoymous person who used the food pantry said: “Brilliant, this place is fantastic, a food pantry makes it more accessible to people.
“People come from all over, it’s lovely, they’re very welcoming. Nice food and nice people.”
Volunteers at the pantry have said that their involvement is not only meaningful but also brings them joy.
Janette Bailey, 53, a volunteer at the pantry said: “I work mainly in the kitchen doing tea, coffees, toast on Wednesday and Friday. There’s a good network of people as well, I got to know a lot of them by talking to them and everything.
“It gets me out, because at the moment I’m out of work, I like coming up and getting my bits, and I love volunteering.”