Community Hero: Access Community Trust nominated

During the 2020-21 Sky Bet Championship football season, Fosters is working in partnership with Norwich City to celebrate its Community Hero initiative, which once a month highlights a deserving community-minded individual or organisation as the ‘Community Hero’ for a selected match day.

We have nominated Access Community Trust for their outstanding community support across both Norfolk and Suffolk – with the Lowestoft-based organisation also our 2021 charity of the year.

One of the many projects operated by the regional charity is PINK Orange, a unique school holiday service that delivers free ingredient kits to families that would normally receive free school meals in term time. The project began in Summer 2020, with an aim to fight back against food poverty and the additional pressures that the pandemic has created for already struggling families.

The not for profit service has grown considerably since its inception, with additional campaigns operated over the October and Christmas school holiday breaks. This Easter a full service will be in operation to support families in need across Norfolk and Suffolk. In Norfolk alone, the charity continues to work in partnership with Norfolk County Council to provide a food and activity provision to over 8,000 children across the county.

Kits contain a mixture of fresh and ambient ingredients that can be used to create a number of meals. The campaign offers easy to follow recipe cards and videos that assist young people in developing life skills around learning about ingredients and how to cook them in a fun way, for the family to sit down and enjoy together.

Ingredients are sourced with support from national food waste organisation Fairshare, national supermarkets including Morrisons and local farmers across East Anglia, even regional brewer Adnams surrendered one of its lorries to help collect food for the project. The service is operated by a growing number of employees and volunteers, who want to support their local communities as much as they can.

Emma Ratzer MBE, CEO of Access Community Trust commented: “Food poverty is a real concern, which has been considerably amplified by the continuing COVID pandemic. Our organisation has adapted our existing service offering at pace since lockdown begun, to support even more young people and their families throughout the region. But we knew we could do more to help households as they continue to struggle school holidays. Each kit not only contains a food provision, it holds helpful literature on a range of support services operated by Access and other likeminded organisations, that offer additional help to families around a number of themes including mental health and wellbeing support.”

Over the next three weeks, over 70 tonnes of ingredients will be packed and delivered by PINK Orange to households across Norfolk and Suffolk, which will help to create around 300,000 meals.

If you would like to support PINK Orange please visit www.pinkorange.co.uk for more information.

Do you think you know someone who could be nominated for our Community Hero award? If there is anyone that you think deserves special recognition, whether the individual works in the emergency services, is a carer or charity champion – nominate someone by visiting the Community Hero page on the official Norwich City website.