Good Works Trust operations manager Sophie Gray. Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi
An Auckland food bank that was facing closure last year can now keep its doors open until the end of term two, thanks to a corporate sponsorship.
Good Works Trust delivers 58 lunch kits a week to families in need through their schools, so they can make a school lunch at home for their kids.
General manager Sophie Gray said donations kept them going through the end of last year, and now they had a one-term sponsorship from GLAD cling wrap.
"That kind of support enables us to at least to plan for ten weeks in advance, it gives the schools some security, the families some security."
She said it had been a "really tough time" since the end of government's Covid-19 response funding for foodbanks.
"The situation that we are in, where we are having to ask for businesses to do this, is far from ideal," she said.
Good Works Trust food bank Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi
But the charity was still encouraging other businesses to look at sponsoring an organisation doing good in the community, instead of a "golf tournament, or a conference".
"We are really really open to talking to other sponsor partners - foundations, grant founders, you name it - because if we want find the funding for this, we will simply have to stop providing the lunches."
Gray said they worked with eight schools in the North Shore, and had demand from many more who would want to use the programme, with reports showing attendance had gone up from families who recieved the lunch kits.
"Our approach is that we keep it very simple. The families get very basic lunch supplies. I could never get my kids to eat a salad sandwich, so we don't attempt to give them a salad sandwich. We give them spreads, and breads, and crackers and biscuits and muesli bars and fruits, and we let families mix and match the proteins and the spreads and the crackers and biscuits to make just ordinary lunches."
She said the money from the government school lunch scheme - which has been plagued with problems around delivery, quality and waste - could be re-directed to organisations already meeting the school lunch need, and the programme might be more effective.
"Most parents want to be able to make lunches for their kids. I don't know that most parents were asking for somebody to provide their kid with a hot meal at school, and we see that is really difficult for them to fulfil."
"[The Good Works lunch kits are] cost effective, there is zero waste, because anything they don't use for lunches goes back into that household, and it's effective, because the schools are identifying the families that need it, versus the families that don't."
David Seymour, the minister in charge of the school lunch scheme, said he was sympathetic to their view.
"The policy we inherited funds lunches by school. There are children from affluent families who can receive the lunches because of the school they attend.
"There are disadvantaged children at affluent schools who do not receive the taxpayer funded lunches. That is the reality of the policy we inherited from Labour.
"The government may change that in the future but we are currently focused on delivering the policy Labour promised but did not fund," said Seymour.
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