A Peckham-based charity has received funding to help develop local food co-operatives.
Pecan, the charity, will help Cooperation Town, a group that facilitates communities to start co-ops. Work in the community will start later this year.
If successful, Cooperation Town will create multiple food co-ops in the Peckham area. These co-ops will join their wider network, giving locals access to cheap, quality food through the organisation’s contacts from whom they buy or are donated food, such as Pecan. This is being done in an effort to reduce cases of food poverty in the local area without forcing people to resort to food banks. “We’re really excited to be working with [Cooperation Town]” said Pecan CEO Chris Price.
The details of the project are set to be announced this spring.
Pecan already has experience in efforts to reduce food poverty in Peckham. It’s first food bank — there are more than 40 today — started in 2009. Peckham Pantry, which for a £4.50 entry fee, allows shoppers to choose 10 items of quality food usually worth between £15-30.
However, Chris Price, CEO of Pecan, does not agree with the concept of ‘food poverty’: “We have more food wasted in London than all the food banks in the country use to feed people…The reason people come to a foodbank isn’t because of food poverty, because that doesn’t exist…they come because they don’t have enough money, and that’s the issue that needs to be resolved.”
In fact, he sees the most pressing issue in the area – and by extension the root of the other problems Pecan tackles – as the cost of housing. This, to him, is the root of the cost of living crisis. “We need people not to focus on people being hungry, but that people do not have enough money – and hunger is the first victim of it.”
In other fields, they run Southwark and Lewisham Women’s Space, HourBank (a skills sharing platform), and provide employment support in conjunction with the National Careers Service, which was their first initiative way back in 1989.
Pecan have already supplied many other local charities with food for their own foodbank initiatives, such as Southwark Daycare Centre for Asylum Seekers, who started a foodbank in the 2020 lockdown to meet demand from their clients. Bettina, a lead social worker at the day-care centre said “When COVID first hit we closed the day centre and operated a foodbank only. The need is so great we continue to give out around 40 food bags every Wednesday.”
Cooperation Town, on the other hand, was started much more recently in late 2019. A free food event in Camden and their initial cooperative in Kentish Town has now grown into a network of cooperatives. They will be looking to draw on Pecan’s decades of experience in the field of tackling food poverty and their intimate knowledge of the needs of Peckham’s communities.
