Food Bank

Exco

Manishabal Kaur (Group Leader)

Amanda Koh (Treasurer)

Shannon Ong (Logistics)

Anthea (Publicity)

Zelene (Secretary)

Challenges faced by Food Bank Singapore

As the price of food continues to rise, many middle to low income families face difficulties putting food on the table as salaries increases lack behind the increases in cost of goods.

Hence, the Food Bank is an organization where companies or people, can come to deposit or donate their unused or unwanted food. These food are then sorted out, repacked and distributed to the needy through a network of member beneficiaries such as the family service centres, homes, soup kitchens etc.

In order to determine which beneficiaries to donate the food to, they meet up with the centre in charge to assess their operations and find out how they distribute their food rations. Some of the beneficiaries that benefit from the Food Bank efforts are the:

Ang Mo Kio Child Care Centre
Beyond Social Services
Children’s Aid Society (Melrose Home)

During our meeting with Food Bank, we discovered that there were little milk products and bread spreads donated as well as beverages. They also shared that their organisation is not known in the community, which makes it even harder to collect food for beneficiaries. As such, they do not have a steady pool of regular volunteers. Those that volunteer, comes only once and thus, often they have to set aside time teaching the new volunteers. These time could otherwise being used more productively, to ready the food donated for distribution.

Empathise

After speaking to the people at Food Bank, we felt motivated to help them as our group could share in their goal of reaching out to the less fortunate in the hope of shaping our society into a better place. Despite being a non-profit organisation, they practically work 24/7 due to the lack of volunteers. On hearing that, we feel more adamant in helping them out.

The Problem

Presently, these are the problems faced:

1) Lack of certain products - Many of the families that they supply food to earn as little as $10 a week. As such, mothers in these families suffer from malnutrition. They can’t breastfeed their babies or afford milk powder. Instead, they rely on condensed milk mixed with water to feed their babies. This is known to be harmful to the baby's overall health. Thus, the organisation need to find ways to collect food products such as:

Milk Powder, UHT Milk, Condensed Milk
Milo, Instant Cereal/Oats, etc.
Jam, Peanut Butter, Nutella, etc.

2) People don’t know about the Food Bank - In order to raise more food, more people have to get to know about the Food Bank. This will help to popularise the organisation and educate the public on things like what they do and types of foods they collect etc so that the public can consider giving away rather than throwing away unused/unwanted food.

3) Lack of regular volunteers - Many that volunteered, come only once. As such, much time and effort are spent teaching and training these new volunteers rather than doing things that mattered in the warehouse.

Our group deliberated and decided to help them in the areas of 1) and 2) as these two problems were of bigger concern and importance.

Next, we brainstormed on solutions that could cover most of these aspects.

Our Proposal

1) Lack of certain products - We plan to hold a food collection drive in school to collect food that are lacking in donation, during CSI day. A series of morning announcements starting on the 1st week of May will be made to the whole school to inform/remind them of the food drive, urging them to contribute to the food drive.

The outline of the announcement will sound like this:

State what Food Bank does
Why we are helping them out
Details about the food drive

ie. What type of food we are going to collect, When are we going to collect and how are we going to collect etc

As we are collecting food products that are lacking in donation, we are hoping to ask all classes to donate at least a few of these food products with a minimum of 4 weeks worth of shelf life. These items will be sorted and packed during CSI Day and subsequently, Food Bank will be called to pick them up.

2) Raise awareness of Food Bank - We will paste flyers around the school, containing details and information of the Food Bank in each class. This will help to increase the student's’ knowledge of the Food Bank like what Food Bank is about and what volunteers can do to help.

In addition, we hope to paste flyers around the school as a constant reminder about the food drive.

Implementation

Firstly, we have to see if our proposal is acceptable by both, the school and Food Bank. After which, we will seek permission for making the series of announcement. Paste flyers around the school. Notify the classes on what to donate. Where and when to drop off the donated items. Then, we will check if the food collected is expired or spoilt. Then we sort, before contacting the Food Bank to collect.

Deployment, materials and resources to make the test/implementation feasible

Head team (will take note of all food items collected, how to sort them out and will oversee the project): 3 people (Melody, Manisha, Abirami)

Logistics team (will collect and sort the food items out accordingly- Preferbly sorting can be completed within a day or so from the collection date so that the organisation can pick them up as soon as possible): 6 people (Shannon, Xin Yu, Zi Xin, Celeste, Amanda and Zelene)

Publicity team (spread awareness to the whole school about the details of the project such as making the script and doing the announcement): 3 people (Heidi, Anthea, Amelia)

Materials Required

FLYERS