Soup and Roll delivery

Who are you?

Sue Morris, admin support for Devonshire West Big Local

What did you do?

Used an existing grant to set up a Soup and Roll delivery to vulnerable residents during the COVID-19 lockdown

Why?

In place of the weekly lunch club that we hold for the residents of local care homes and to give them some company – from a safe distance

What’s the benefit?

The residents have something to look forward to and it gives us a way of supporting the local community at this time

With support from Big Local, I set up a local organisation in 2013 called Community Stuff, which works with the local community on a range of projects including support with cooking on a budget.

One of our projects is a lunch club for older and isolated residents which we have been running for about a year with funding from Devonshire West Big Local and a few other local organisations. Following the COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent lockdown, we had no choice but to cancel the lunch club until further notice.

Many of the lunch club members are older residents and live in the same residential home in Eastbourne. On 25 March, the home confirmed their first case of COVID-19, meaning that the other 66 residents had to self-isolate in their rooms for 10 days – a time period has since been extended.

We already knew from my conversations at the lunch club that this was the only social contact of the week for many of the older members. This, combined with the fact that all of the residents would now be spending all their time on their own, inspired us to start-up a food delivery service so that we could continue to have some contact with them.

In order to get this up and running, Clare – the person I run the lunch club with – and I asked the board if we could use the rest of the lunch club grant to do a homemade Soup and Roll delivery for these residents.

Thankfully, they agreed and then the announcement came that every Big Local area would be receiving an additional £50,000 of funding. We applied and were granted £3,000, which has given us a really healthy cushion to ensure that this project succeeds.

We make the soup at our community hub, package it in takeaway cups and deliver it by ringing the doorbell and stepping back a safe distance. We make sure everyone answers the door or responds in some way as there are currently no staff working at the residential homes.

When we first started our Soup and Roll delivery we had 18 clients, this has now grown to 39. The residents seem to be really enjoying it and we’ve had lots of lovely feedback from people. For many of them, the soup is the highlight of their day and one lady told me the other day that she hadn’t spoken to anyone since the last soup delivery a few days before.

Aside from Clare and I, we have recently got three volunteers. One of the volunteers helps with the cooking and the other two do the deliveries for us so that there are more of us making soup.

Other areas in Eastbourne have expressed interest in having this service in their area, so we are applying for some funding outside of Big Local to help them out.

Because we had an established project before the lockdown, we already get support from the local veg warehouse and a lot of donations from the food bank. At current capacity, we think we can do up to 200 portions of soup a day so I am hoping that we can recruit some more volunteers who will be able to deliver our soup around the whole of Eastbourne for those who want it.