In this episode of Food Stories from FareShare Greater Manchester, we head to Bury to meet the team at Trust House Bury – a community hub making a real difference to local people facing a range of challenges.
Based at the Metro Christian Centre, Trust House Bury offers free support and advice to local individuals and families. Over the past seven years, they’ve supported people experiencing food poverty, fuel insecurity and mental health challenges. They provide not just practical help, but a welcoming and supportive environment.
“Food is a gateway”
At the heart of their work is a community pantry and café. They’re both powered by surplus food from FareShare Greater Manchester. The pantry offers affordable weekly shopping, helping people stretch their budgets further, while the café creates a warm space for connection.
We hear from Centre Manager Katy Jenkinson, who explains how food acts as a gateway to deeper, more meaningful support – opening up conversations and helping to tackle isolation. You’ll also hear from Gemma, a community support worker, and a long-time pantry member, who describes the service as a true “lifeline” for the community.
This episode highlights the power of community-led support and the vital role food can play in bringing people together and changing lives.
You can find out more about Trust House Bury, you can find their website here.
Want to join our Community Food Membership?
If you’re supporting your community with food and want to know more about our membership, please get in touch! Contact our Membership and Information Coordinator, Karina by email : membership@emergemanchester.co.uk or give us a call on 0161 223 8200 (Option 4).
In this episode of Food Stories, we visit Levenshulme Inspire, a welcoming community hub based in the Levenshulme United Reformed Church building on Stockport Road.
Created when the church chose to open its doors to the wider community 15 years ago, Inspire has grown into a vibrant centre offering activities for people of all ages – from toddler groups and creative classes to fitness sessions for older residents.
A Community Café
At the heart of the centre is a community café, open five days a week and serving freshly cooked, low-cost meals using surplus food, including ingredients supplied by FareShare Greater Manchester. The centre also runs a community fridge, helping reduce food waste while making food available to anyone who needs it.
In this episode we hear from Zaneta, Inspire’s Café Coordinator, Chef Andy, volunteer Rahila and regular visitors Pauline and Billy, who share how the centre provides not just food but friendship, opportunity and a place to belong.
Listen now to discover how spaces like Levenshulme Inspire are helping bring communities together.
You can find out more about Levenshulme Inspire on their website.
Want to join our Community Food Membership?
If you’re supporting your community with food and want to know more about our membership, please get in touch!
Contact our Membership and Information Coordinator, Karina by email : membership@emergemanchester.co.uk or give us a call on 0161 223 8200 (Option 4).
In this episode of Food Stories, we look at a special Christmas tradition that helps ensure people across Greater Manchester can enjoy a festive meal. Each year, FareShare Greater Manchester receives a delivery of ingredients for Christmas dinners thanks to the Buckingham Emergency Food Appeal (BEFA).
Ken Smith from BEFA shares the story of how the appeal began 40 years ago with a single truck delivering turkeys for people in need, and how it has since grown into a much larger operation supporting organisations across the country.
BEFA’s Impact in the North West
We also hear from FareShare Greater Manchester’s Membership and Information Coordinator, Karina Tiplady, about the logistics of handling such a large delivery at one of the busiest times of year. We also chat to our volunteers and Lifeshare, a charity, which turns these ingredients into Christmas dinners for people experiencing hardship.
This episode celebrates the partnerships, planning and community spirit that help bring a little extra warmth and dignity to people at Christmas.
You can listen to the episode here or search for Food Stories from FareShare Greater Manchester wherever you get your podcasts.
To find out more about the Buckingham Emergency Food Appeal, you can find their website here.
Want to join our Community Food Membership?
If you’re supporting your community with food and want to know more about our membership, please get in touch!
Contact our Membership and Information Coordinator, Karina by email : membership@emergemanchester.co.uk or give us a call on 0161 223 8200 (Option 4).
Food Waste Action Week begins today and we’re celebrating with the return of our Food Stories Podcast!
We took our microphone out to Crumpsall to chat to the amazing team behind Rainbow Surprise, one of our community food members, who are doing amazing things with surplus food to support their local community and people from further afield too.
Serving Crumpsall and beyond
Rainbow Surprise is a busy community hub which operates out of Crumpsall Community Hall. Run by husband-and-wife team, Shakar and Shabnam Hussain, the services on offer include emergency food parcels, a food bank, community café, a salon offering haircuts and a recently opened community garden and outdoor space which is used to grow fresh produce.
You can listen to the episode here (see player above) or search for Food Stories from FareShare Greater Manchester wherever you get your podcasts.
To find out more about Rainbow Surprise, please check out their website.
Want to join our Community Food Membership?
If you’re supporting your community with food and want to know more about our membership, please get in touch!
Please contact our Membership Information Coordinator, Karina.
You can reach her by email : membership@emergemanchester.co.uk or give us a call on 0161 223 8200 (Option 4).
Happy World Food Day! To mark this special day, we’re taking you back to May this year when 90 corporate volunteers got their aprons on, rolled up their sleeves and got busy cooking 1,500 meals for people experiencing homelessness across Greater Manchester.
The event, organised by Cracking Good Food and supported with surplus food from FareShare Greater Manchester was held at Freight Island in central Manchester. Teams of volunteers from different businesses signed up to spend the day chopping, grating and cooking piles of veg to support charities working with people experiencing homelessness in every borough of Greater Manchester.
Homelessness affects over 7,000 people in Manchester, making access to nutritious food a significant challenge for many individuals and families. Simultaneously, the UK wastes 4 million tonnes of food each year. By participating in the Carnival COOK-Up, local businesses released members of staff to help address both of these critical issues, providing delicious meals to those in need and preventing perfectly good ingredients from going to waste.
There were three dishes on the menu, Vegan Bean Chilli, Potato and Bean Stew and Vegetable Stronganoff. At the end of the day organisations who support people experiencing homelessness with food came to pick up the meals. Among those who received them was the Booth Centre – their chef Claire appeared in this podcast episode.
Our thanks to everyone who spoke to us for this episode including Alex & Tracy from Cracking Good Food, Caroline from Slalom, Ellie from Dunsters Farm, Claire from the Booth Centre, textile artist Wendy Roby & the Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham.
To find out more about Cracking Good Food, you can find their website here.
Catering groups make up a small but hugely important part of our Community Food Membership. Increasingly, we receive larger amounts of catering sized packs of food, so we are looking to sign up more catering groups to our books.
If you’re cooking for your local community and think we can help you with food, please get in touch with us. Contact our Membership & Information Coordinator Karina on membership@emergemanchester.co.uk or give us a call on 0161 223 8200 (Option 4).
In the last of our special Food Waste Action Week podcast episodes, we’re taking you to meet another one of our community food members.
Trafford Veterans has been working with FareShare Greater Manchester since the Covid pandemic. The group, which supports armed forces & emergency services veterans living in Trafford, has been running for a decade. When the pandemic hit, it extended the services it offers to include food too.
In 2015, the group was formed after its two founding members, Royal Navy Veteran, Claire Wright & British Army Veteran Chris Squires (pictured below), left the armed forces and faced a struggle with physical and mental injuries. This affected their transition from the military back into their respective communities.
Chris and Claire’s experiences prompted them to provide peer support to other veterans and members of the community, so people would not feel alone.
Each week, with the help of local volunteers, they run a Friday Hub where people can come to access help and support as well as enjoy a light lunch. Their monthly Breakfast Club offers a social space for people to meet and chat over a cooked breakfast. Both of these events are supported by food they receive from FareShare Greater Manchester.
We went along to one of their monthly Breakfast Clubs to find out more about what they do and see where some of the good-to-eat surplus food we provide them with goes. You can see some photos below of the Breakfast Club and the North West Corps of Drums which includes Claire and her fellow veterans and performed for the members during our visit.
You can find out more about Trafford Veterans on their website.
If you enjoy listening to this podcast episode, please share it with anyone who you think would benefit from hearing it too. To find out when our next episode is out, please subscribe to Food Stories Podcast on your podcast app, and follow us on social media.
Catering groups make up a small but hugely important part of our Community Food Membership. Increasingly, we receive larger amounts of catering sized packs of food, so we are looking to sign up more catering groups to our books.
If you’re cooking for your local community and think we can help you with food, please get in touch with us. Contact our Membership & Information Coordinator Karina on membership@emergemanchester.co.uk or give us a call on 0161 223 8200 (Option 4).
Food Stories Podcast is back for a special mini-series for Food Waste Action Week. In this cookery club podcast episode, we’re taking you to visit one of our Community Food Members, St Paul’s Cookery Club in Wythenshawe. The after-school club offers studcookery club podcastents the chance to learn the important life skill of cookery in a fun environment. At the end of each session, each child gets enough food to take home and feed their whole household.
Set up by two members of the non-teaching staff at the school, Angie Ridgeway (PA to the Headteacher) and Jackie Sumner (School Caretaker) as a way of engaging pupils after school, the club sources good-to-eat surplus food from FareShare Greater Manchester to use each week. The students involved not only learn new skills but they know they are helping the environment by preventing the food from going to waste. This cookery club podcast highlights the real-world impact of community food initiatives like these.
Catering groups make up a small but hugely important part of our Community Food Membership. Increasingly, we receive larger amounts of catering sized packs of food, so we are looking to sign up more catering groups to our books. If you are cooking for your local community and think we can help you with food, please get in touch with us. Contact our Membership & Information Coordinator Karina on membership@emergemanchester.co.uk or give us a call on 0161 223 8200 (Option 4).
In this episode of the Food Stories Podcast, corporate partnerships are our focus. Partnerships with businesses across Greater Manchester are vital to our work. Without their financial support, professional help and volunteering provided by our corporate partners, we would not be able to achieve as much as we do at FareShare Greater Manchester.
Assistance from our corporate partners can range from sponsoring a delivery vehicle to engaging staff in team-building volunteering days as well as offering professional support in the form of resources or advice. In this episode, we explore the different levels of corporate partnership we offer at FareShare Greater Manchester as well as hearing from one of our long-standing partners, N Brown.
If you are interested in exploring Corporate Partnerships with FareShare Greater Manchester, please get in touch.
Email: corporatesupport@emergemanchester.co.uk or find out more here about becoming a corporate partner.
This time on food stories podcast episode 5, we are sharing the story of one of our community food members, Emmie’s Kitchen. The charity was set up to support parents staying at Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital while their children are being cared for there.
The charity was started by the family of Emmie, a young girl who, when she was being treated for leukaemia, identified a need to support the families of other sick children. What started as an operation to cook meals for those parents, has developed into a weekly takeaway delivery (on a Friday night) as well as wellbeing events for families and special Christmas goody bags too.
Emmie finished her treatment in 2019, but the family are committed to keeping Emmie’s Kitchen going. As part of their Friday night offering, they give parents snack bags to support them over the weekend – much of the food in those bags comes from FareShare Greater Manchester.
In this food stories podcast episode 5, we visit the Emmie’s Kitchen team on one of their Friday night takeaway evenings and sit down for a chat with Eve and Jacqueline Naraynsingh, Emmie’s Mum and Gran.
You can follow Emmie’s Kitchen on social media:
FareShare Plus is a community cash and carry which operates alongside our main warehouse at FareShare Greater Manchester. It gives our Community Food Members an alternative way to access the surplus good-to-eat food we have in stock by letting organisations come to browse the food on offer and take away what they need.
Each week 80 charities and community groups visit FareShare Plus to buy the food they use to serve their local communities. For many groups, food is a way of opening conversations to help those they support access other services. If you’re interested in joining FareShare as a Community Food Member, find out how to join FareShare.
In this food stories podcast episode 4, we take you on a tour of our FareShare Plus operation and introduce you to a couple of our Community Food Members who visit on a weekly basis; St George’s Day Centre in Bolton and Fresh which supports schools in Stockport which are are helping families in their community with food and tackle food insecurity. The community cash and carry model allows these organisations to access affordable food, making a significant difference to families in need. If you’re inspired to help, consider supporting our work as a volunteer or fundraise for charity.
Listen to this food stories podcast episode 4 on your favourite podcast app or via the player below. If you enjoy listening to this episode, please share it with anyone who you think would benefit from listening too!
