Weston Community Café – how they overcame difficulties of providing food for their community during the pandemic

Weston Welcome Café opens every Monday at Weston Hub on the edge of Bath. The Café serves free hot meals, and then there is a Food Club for fresh fruit and vegetables, and tinned and dried goods. Local people become members of the Food Club, and can then come every week, and choose what they need. Their FareShare South West delivery arrives by 10am every Monday, which is perfect timing to get cooking with the ingredients ready to open at midday. The programme is run by All Saints Church in Weston Village, and when the Cafe and Food Club opened in July 2020, 45 volunteers signed up, showing a real community effort to help those in need.

Peter Heywood who helps to coordinate the project says they are now good friends with all their beneficiaries, creating a very welcoming atmosphere and a friendly community. The picture above was taken at their special Christmas lunch that the volunteers put on in their hall, which included a meal with all the trimmings accompanied by some live music. Decorations were hung with presents and gifts donated by local businesses and FSSW distributed to their community.

Peter says: “Now in this third lockdown, the Food Club is still in operation, and the Café has been taken ‘outside’ under a canopy, where hot food is still available but in take-away form.”

Their beneficiaries are mainly single adults from the Weston and Newbridge areas, near Bath but also include couples and families with small children. They have had to adapt their operations during the pandemic, and will return to normal as soon as they can.

“We plan to get back up and running in our Café indoors as soon as we’re able to do so”

Visit their page here to find out more

Donate to FoodStock 2020

FareShare is the only charity to take food from the wholesale level of the food industry

The vast majority of surplus occurs before food even gets to the supermarket. Each member of the FareShare network rescues that food and delivers it to those in need. FareShare Go is our supermarket collection service, which deals with supermarket-level surplus.

Find out more about what we do