Charity launches ‘donate your dinner’ campaign to feed homeless during lockdown

‘We are asking people to donate £10 to help fund a daily food parcel for one homeless person,’ says The Passage CEO Mick Clarke

(The Passage)

A “donate your dinner” campaign aimed at feeding homeless people during lockdown has been launched by a charity.

The Passage, which provides food for rough sleepers, says it plans to deliver 320 hot meals and food parcels to those in need across London every day for the next 10 weeks.

The charity needs to raise £300,000 to meet that target and is calling on the public to donate £10 to cover the cost of its food parcels.

It is also asking those who donate to upload a photo or video of themselves cooking dinner to social media using the hashtag #DonateYourDinner to raise awareness.

Each parcel contains four slices of bread, butter, cereal, a carton of milk, crisps, chocolate, teabags, sugar, cutlery and other items that the charity receives from its partners.

Dinner is a cooked meal that varies each day and is packed in an insulated box.

Launching the campaign, The Passage CEO Mick Clarke said: “Our priority is to ensure that homeless people have somewhere safe to stay, are well fed and do not return to the streets.

“We are asking people to donate £10 to help fund a daily food parcel for one homeless person.

“At this time of lockdown, when many of us are unable to enjoy a meal with family and friends, we also encourage people to join us on social media to celebrate food by sharing recipes and their dining experiences.”

The Passage head chef, Claudette, who has worked at the charity for 21 years, says it is more important than ever to help the homeless.

She told The Metro: “Because we can no longer open our Resource Centre as normal, we have developed a mobile food delivery service and we are making 320 food parcels and 320 hot, nutritious dinners freshly cooked in The Passage kitchen a day to feed London’s homeless.

“The individuals who will be receiving the provisions are those who have been recently placed in emergency accommodation. To put this service into perspective, prior to the [current] crisis, we were serving food to up to 150 people a day in our Resource Centre.”

Concerns have been growing over the plight of homeless people during the lockdown.

Current estimates suggest around 5,000 people sleep rough, and 40,000 people use shelters or hostels, in the UK on any given night.

Last month, Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick announced £3.2 million of emergency funding to help rough sleepers self-isolate.

But homeless organisations say the government’s measures for hostels and day centres “fail to provide the much more comprehensive plan and wide-ranging action needed to ensure that everyone facing homelessness is provided with self-contained accommodation, to ensure that they can self-isolate, and that people experiencing financial hardship are not left facing homelessness..."

Matthew Downie, director of policy and external affairs at Crisis, said “even the government’s basic advice on self-isolation cannot be followed” by rough sleepers on the streets or in communal shelters.

“If you bear in mind the severity of mental health issues, other health issues, this is a population of people where the average age of death is 45 and people die regularly from respiratory problems.

“What we are calling for is extraordinary measures to make sure people don’t die... simply because they are homeless, and we are going to see that unless there is a re-categorisation of people who are homeless as vulnerable, and therefore the state organises itself to find those people, do health checks, give emergency medical provision to people or housing.”