The Felix Project helped thousands of people experience a much happier holiday over Christmas thanks to its work redirecting tonnes of surplus food via the community distribution events.
Over Christmas and New Year almost 90% of the charities and primary schools The Felix Project regularly supports were closed, meaning alternative destinations had to be found for almost 700 tonnes of food.
Most of this food was divided up between existing community organisations that were open and alternate sites that Felix does not regularly deliver too. Each community distribution event saw organisations receive a much larger delivery, almost a full van load of food that would have been enough to feed more than 150 families.
Between 16th December 2024 and 5th January 2025, 717 different community distribution events took place. Of those deliveries, we were able to support 161 non-regular community organisations, who in total got 353 deliveries. Sites included housing associations, nurseries, soup kitchens, mosques and more. It also included schools that opened especially to take delivery of the food.
Rachel Ledwith, Head of Community for The Felix Project said: “We know the festive period is a very hard time for people, particularly those on low incomes who may feel pressure to buy more than they can afford. This year, during that time Felix gave out the equivalent of over 2.2M meals to people in need, 828,000 of those meals were specifically through our community distribution events. People would have received a huge range of vegetables, fruit, meat, dairy, bread, delicious Christmas treats and more.
“Many of the organisations who got food are not our regular organisations and we have to work incredibly hard to find and support suitable alternatives. Many of these locations respond to the huge demand for support by opening all hours in the run up to and including Christmas Eve. Like us, they want to help as many people as possible to have something that hopefully makes this time of year just that bit special!”
One of the places was Feed the Hill, a social supermarket in New Cross. They picked up three entire van loads of food over the Christmas break. Project Co-ordinator, Sharon Shamir said: “The food we got helped even more people than usual. For most people, Christmas is a very busy time, but there is also increased pressure. Schools are shut and a lot of other sources of food support shut down for the holidays, so we need to be there for a greater number of people. The extra food allowed us to do just that, and everything we got went in a record time!”
The events were a huge logistical job, during that time across Felix’s four depots 1,912 volunteers helped to either sort or deliver food, giving up an incredible 7,140 hours of their time.
On top of the redirected food, The Felix Project saw a big increase in the amount of food they had to sort. In the week before Christmas the charity sent out over 412 tonnes of surplus, 60 tonnes more than the previous few weeks and 90 tonnes more than an average week.
