Waitara Pataka Kai manager Amy Olsen. Photo: RNZ / Robin Martin
A Taranaki foodbank is prioritising food-sovereignty to counter a broken model.
Staff at the Waitara Foodbank Pataka Kai have seen more new faces walk through their doors but community donations do not cover the influx.
The foodbank's co-chairperson Tiri Porter (Te Ātiawa, Ngāpuhi) said more needed to be done.
"It's desperate times for people. The cost-of-living crisis affects us all and it's aggravated for a generation of people who have never learned how to cook or grow kai.
"The foodbank system is broken, it's operating on a model of dependency for funding and for many of our regular users. This has to change because it's simply unsustainable," she said.
Foodbanks around the motu have expressed that they are struggling to cater for everyone with the lack of funds.
The Waitara foodbank had seen about 'a third more' people seeking food parcels in the last year and more people visiting for the first time, but public donations had decreased by about 50 percent compared to the last year, they said.
Operations manager Amy Olsen said generations of whānau used the service, so she was trying to break the pattern and give service users the right tools.
"There seemed to be in Waitara a big chunk of a generation that never learnt how to cook their own kai. It's time to close the generational gap of foodbank reliance and change people's future for their moko's future."
Waitara Pataka Kai's nine-week pilot programme caters for 16 people at a time - mostly from family groups. Photo: RNZ / Robin Martin
Instead of putting all efforts into making and dishing out food parcels, Olsen and the 35 volunteers are putting more time and resources into food resilience.
"It was amazing how many people didn't know what to do with what we were giving them. So the resilient side of it is encouraging and supporting people to be more self-reliant and achieve long-term food security."
Alongside Olsen's jam-packed cooking classes, a free version of My Food Bag has been launched using cupboard staples and nutritious in-season vegetables.
"Gone are the days where you come to a foodbank, and you just get given a box of random stuff that you can't do anything with."
Olsen recently called for people to add an extra row of fruit and veges to their home gardens which could be given to friends, whānau, neighbours, or foodbanks, which grew the need for a community garden.
"Waitara has got a really in-depth history with the whenua. So progressing and prioritising people towards supporting people to integrating food sovereignty systems. So getting back out into the whenua with your whānau and growing your own kai is really uplifting."
Connecting to the land also helps with addiction recovery, she said.
"It's not just about the food coming out of it, it's about the mahi that they're doing on themselves and being out there growing."
Having a community garden would allow people to potter freely and take information home to start their own garden. For those who could not due to their living situation, the community garden would allow for individual whānau māra kai, she said.
Learning how to use what you've already got is a high priority for this foodbank. Photo: Supplied / Waitara Foodbank
"Everything that we do here is community-led and community-driven, we're listening to the people."
But they were needing land to turn their six-month dream a reality.
"A lot of people said they would just love to have somewhere they could go to freely and hang out with other people. It wasn't even just about the food - it shocked me actually - one of the main reasons people would want a community garden is the social side of it."
The Waitara branch has also become a hub to direct people to other health and well-being services.
"Because food is often only one of the things that someone needs, and if you're hungry, there's 12 other things that suffer," Olsen said.
"Everything's hard because it's not just food [prices] that went up, everything went up."
On Sunday, 1 December the foodbank held its annual community collections run to help stock cupboards for the busy Christmas period.
The Waitara Foodbank - Pataka Kai are "overwhelmed, overjoyed, overtired, and completely in awe" of the donations from the rohe.
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