City Bridge Trust will help City Harvest feed over 60,000 Londoners in poverty after awarding the charity £79,800 to run a food storage warehouse in Ealing.
City Harvest will use the money to pay for a manager to run the London site which will deliver enough food to make more than three million meals a year.
The charity distributes fresh, nutritious food to Londoners in poverty seven days a week in 23 out of 32 the capital’s boroughs.
City Harvest has grown significantly over the last year, meeting the growing needs of people in London facing food poverty.
It has secured several large contracts from major food producers to take their surplus food direct into its new warehouse.
The warehouse, which is currently run by volunteers, allows the charity to collect and deliver 30 tonnes of food each week and has industrial freezers that keep food for longer.
Alison Gowman, Chairman of the City of London Corporation’s City Bridge Trust Committee, commented: “City Harvest operates in a city where an estimated 2.25 million people live in poverty, 74,000 children go to bed hungry and thousands of tonnes of good, nutritious surplus food are sent to landfill every year.
“As a relatively new organisation, the charity has grown extremely quickly, already preventing over three million Londoners from going hungry since it begun.
“Together we are helping Londoners in food poverty and supporting social businesses to grow, so more and more people can be supported.
“City Bridge Trust is committed to making London a fairer place to work and live.”
Laura Winningham, CEO of City Harvest commented: “In London, one of the wealthiest cities in the world, more than 25% of the population face food insecurity. Meanwhile, tonnes of nutritious surplus food from manufacturers, retailers, restaurants and the hospitality industry is sent to landfill each day.
“The support from City Bridge Trust enables us to connect waste and want safely, reliably and efficiently and in the next 12 months distribute food for more than three million meals to vulnerable people in our community.”
Since it began, City Harvest has redistributed 1,400 tonnes of food that would otherwise have gone to landfill, feeding three million Londoners and stopping 5,258 tons of greenhouse gases being released into the environment.
City Bridge Trust is the funding arm of the City of London Corporation’s charity, Bridge House Estates. It is London’s biggest independent grant giver, making grants of £20 million a year to tackle disadvantage across the capital.
The Trust has awarded around 7,900 grants totalling over £380 million since it first began in 1995. It helps achieve the City Corporation’s aim of changing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Londoners.