Since I started in post at Micah in January 2025, I have been trying to write a newsletter. After much thought and many drafts, a moment happened last week which gathered my thoughts. On Thursday we calculated that 337 emergency food parcels had been given out in a total of 4 hours at Micah’s foodbanks. This is a significant increase on recent times. In 2024 Micah made the difficult decision to change it’s Parcel Policy, reducing the number of foodbank visits an individual could make from 8 to 4 in a 12 week period. The increases in food prices had resulted in more people attending the foodbanks, as well as making it impossible for Micah to purchase food at these costs for so many (over 500 people each week). It was not an easy decision, it pulls on heart strings when you listen to someone’s story as to how they’ve ended up experiencing food poverty. Yet foodbanks are intended to provide emergency/crisis food provision. Not a weekly shop (unlike our food markets that aim to provide an affordable top up).
Living in crisis
The truth is that many people are living in crisis each week. Food poverty has reached an emergency level. Recently released data shows that 3.12 million people accessed Trussell Trust foodbanks in 2024. In 2008, this figure was just under 26,0001. Micah is one of many community food spaces in Liverpool. We’re not alone in witnessing the scale of the problem. The fact is foodbanks aren’t and shouldn’t be sustainable. I’ve said many times that foodbanks have become a social service run by charities – it’s the kindness of strangers. Our work is not something to celebrate. Yes, an achievement and full tribute to staff, volunteers and donors, but that foodbanks even exist is not a good thing. We should be looking at the root causes of food poverty in order to enable people to buy their own food. The huge inequalities in the UK challenge the notion we are a wealthy country2 but there is enough food and enough money. Nobody in the UK should be hungry.
We must fix this together
As someone who has enough food to eat, I hold in my heart the phone calls I’ve had this year. A woman who had a supermarket sandwich and was taking one bite a day to make it last to make sure she didn’t starve. Countless calls from people who had been housed in hotels for a range of reasons, didn’t have cooking facilities, were hungry but struggled with depression or agoraphobia so needed their food delivered (a service we don’t provide) and the GP surgery that called with a patient who hadn’t eaten for two and a half days, who I was told needed food within 8 hours, or they would die. These stories are part of the story of what motivates me to carry on. We are a charity, but we should not be doing the work of a statutory service. That said, I think we all have a duty of care. As humans created with empathy, designed to flourish in community, we need to fix this … together, quickly and with kindness.
Catherine Kearney, CEO Micah Liverpool
Future posts will highlight other aspects of Micah’s social justice work including its community food markets, Recruitability programme and partnership with Zarach, a child bed poverty project.
1 https://www.statista.com/statistics/382695/uk-foodbank-users/
2 https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/