Bob walked 15km to help raise money for food parcels
Bob
Torbay, England
I started helping out Torbay Food Alliance, who were part founded by Torbay Community Development Trust, during the COVID-19 crisis in the summer.
I went online to look for places I could help in Torbay and got a call from one of the 12 groups in the Torbay Food Alliance. They were making food parcels and preparing meals to deliver to people.
My first day helping out, I ended up peeling potatoes. I’ve never peeled a potato in my life and I thought, ‘this is hard work, I’m not so sure about that!’, so I made a couple of phonecalls to local shops and asked if we could bring the potatoes around and put them through their industrial peeler. I decided I wanted to make life easier for them all, so I did a 15km walk to raise money for a second-hand commercial peeler for the group.
As the crisis went on, there became more and more holes in support, so there were two or three different ways I was helping out my community. On a Tuesday and a Friday, I’d drive up to Bristol to collect two pallet loads of dry goods to drop them off at some of the other organisations in the Alliance.
If you’ve got 1% of a thought that you might like to help, I’d say do it because it is very rewarding. I was talking to one of the lads I work with who said he wished he’d volunteered and I said, just go and do it, it’s there all the time! If you can only spend a couple of hours a week on it, it’s worth doing.
