Sanatan Community Service is a CIC whose aims are to prevent Food Wastage and address Food Poverty. The original initiative was to provide hot meals for the homeless, elderly and vulnerable people during the lockdown period but fair to say we haven’t looked back! With the rising cost of living and economic conditions, we felt there was a genuine need in the community. We slowly started a few more
initiatives. We are fully volunteer-led, non-profit organisation with approximately 20 individuals who are religiously committed to the cause of “Give back to the community” attitude. We work in partnership with Fareshare, Neighbourly and with various local supermarkets directly. Generally, food donated by various organisations is collected, triaged, and made available to the needy on a weekly basis. We also cook hot meals from these saved ingredients. Currently, we are involved in four different projects based on our two objectives: minimizing food wastage and poverty. Feed the Homeless – Every Saturday morning average 150 hot meals mostly, Indian curry and rice are cooked and delivered to the Framework Charity’s homeless people. Food bank - All donations are made available for the food bank. Currently 160 families are registered and average 70 families come to collect the free groceries every Saturday morning between 9 AM and 11 AM. Community Kitchen – All the food bank consumers are served with the takeaway hot meals every Saturday mornings. Free School Meal Children Hot Food – We are also involved with Nottingham Forest Field in cooking and delivering average 400 meals to the children who are eligible for free school meals during the school holidays. We truly believe food wastage not only exacerbates food insecurity, but it also causes severe damage to our environment. Along with the food wastage, we are also unnecessarily damaging precious resources that went into producing this food including the use of land, natural resources, and therefore the impact on the environment. In a world where people are dying from hunger, one-third of all food produced is thrown away every year. With these statistics in place, there is a huge need to reduce this environmental footprint along with the challenge to feed more people while wasting less of what we already produce. Our initiative is our contribution to connect these two dots: save the food wastage and deliver it to who needs the most minimizing food poverty. Fulfilling the feeling regarding the need to ‘give back’ and ‘contribute to the society’ is unparalleled. It is statistically proven that people who volunteer regularly are healthier both physically and mentally. In addition to the health benefits, volunteering gives people a sense of purpose. Hence, we strongly believe in building such a legacy and especially promoting youth participation through volunteering; offering opportunities for young people to contribute to our projects, while building their skills and professional experience. A number of young people are committed on a weekly basis to volunteering in our initiatives. Our vision over time is to diversify into other humanitarian projects with particular focus on mental and physical health, combating isolation etc.. We have a confidence that there are endless endeavors waiting to add a value to our community and make this world a better place together…
