Re-Food looking for volunteers to fight hunger – publico

                 

                         
                     

                 

 
                         

The Re-food promotes on Thursday a “community meeting” that will challenge people to participate in this project to combat hunger and food waste, which has rescued and donated 407,000 meals which were bound waste.

                     

                         The meeting, to be held at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, is promoted by Re-food core in the Lisbon neighborhood of Our Lady of Fatima, where the project was born on March 9, 2011 on the initiative of Hunter Halder, an American who lives in Portugal for over twenty years.

The purpose of the meeting is “raising volunteers for us and for organizations invited to attend the event [the AC2, the threshold, the Pro Bono, the Super Babysitters, the Heart Yellow and Sapana], “he told Lusa agency Francisca Red, volunteer at the core of Our Lady of Fatima.

Francisca Red explained that, unlike other Re-Food cores that began this year, core Our Lady of Fatima “never made a massive call for volunteers.”

There have been “some difficulty in pulling people more intensely for the project” and “the idea is to make people agree a little of their indifference and become more cohesive. “

The core of Our Lady of Fatima currently has 250 volunteers, but it would take about 300 to distribute about 330 meals to needy people there turn.

According to Francisca Red, the number of people looking to Re-Food has been growing, as are the restaurants and companies that adhere to the movement, which has rescued more than 25,000 meals a month ..

“We are growing at a brutal speed, there are already 17 cores and probably this number will double by the end of the year,” forward

As of June should open multiple cores: Bethlehem, Santa Clara, Alcantara, Covilha, San Antonio, Almancil, Cascais and Ermesinde.

The project currently has 2314 volunteers in 17 cores and supports 1726 people daily. To be able to perform task, the Re-food has “687 food sources”, including restaurants, cafes, pastry shops, bakeries, cafeterias, supermarkets and hypermarkets.

The volunteer said that the support of supermarkets and hypermarkets was very important to improve the quality of feeding the needy families.

“In addition to the meals, we spent to give yogurt, fruit, vegetables, which greatly improved the quality of feeding our families,” he said .

Red Francisca said Lusa that another objective of the Re-food is that some beneficiaries to move to other centers, as they are opening in other neighborhoods.

“While core founder have many people that there are in the neighborhood and would like to see for your neighborhood, “said the volunteer, admitting, however, that will not always be possible because many beneficiaries do not want the neighbors to know your situation.

Portugal, 2.6 million people live at risk of poverty and social exclusion, and of these more than 640,000 are children and youth.