Turning Surplus Food into Community Support

Food outside 71 School Lane, a regular collection point.

Every week, The Craft Room collects surplus food from Aldi and Marks & Spencer, helping to prevent good food from going to waste while making it available to people in our local community.

The initiative is completely volunteer-led, with food collected as and when it becomes available and then redistributed through several community locations.

Food is currently shared from Breaks Manor Youth and Community Centre, The Howard Centre, and 71 School Lane in Welwyn. The residents of 71 School Lane kindly allow surplus food to be laid out in front of their property, making it easy for local residents to access.

A volunteer, Sandy Jones, founder of The Craft Room, is also a resident of School Lane and helps coordinate this community collection and then collects any remaining food, tidies the area and clears everything away afterwards.

Availability is advertised through the Welwyn Village News a Facebook page, allowing local residents to know when food is available. The response from the community has been incredible. On some occasions, more than 100kg of surplus food has been collected within just 30 minutes of being put out — a fantastic demonstration of both the need for the initiative and the community's willingness to make use of food that might otherwise have gone to waste.

What makes this project particularly special is that it has grown organically through volunteers, local businesses and the community working together. There is no complicated process for accessing the food; when surplus is available, we simply share it with the people who can use it.

We are incredibly grateful to Aldi and Marks & Spencer for making their surplus available, to our volunteers who collect and distribute it, to the residents of School Lane for allowing the collection point to operate outside their homes, and to everyone in the community who helps spread the word.

It is a simple idea with a very real impact: good food that might otherwise be wasted is finding its way onto local tables instead. 💚