Chipping Norton larder is more than a food bank - it's really bought the community together

The Chippy Larder is bringing the town’s community together through a series of charitable initiatives.

West Oxfordshire District councillor Rizvana Poole was inspired to do more for her community when her inquisitive teenage children returned from school one day, asking what she was doing to help the planet.

Rizvana then jumped straight into action and organised a food bank out of the local leisure centre, which started handing out food packages at the beginning of the first lockdown in March 2020.

Over three years later, the Chippy Larder now has a permanent base at the town’s Guildhall and serves around 160 families in the community every Thursday with a wide selection of healthy foods.

The services of the larder are not restricted to handing out food, and Rizvana and the team often organise for users of the larder to receive clothes, guidance on the cost of living or mental health services, school equipment, and connections to local employers.

Rizvana said: "We want to nourish our community, physically, mentally, and emotionally. Empower them to want better and to achieve more for themselves and for the community as a whole. We also want people to make connections in the town, either by volunteering at the larder or with other organisations in the area.

"We nourish, empower, and connect through food from the weekly larder, finance, where we support people who are struggling with financial vulnerability, fitness, which is physical and mental, and futures, where we focus on the younger generations.

"It might not be apparent to some people, but we have high levels of deprivation in Chipping Norton, which includes social as well as financial, and we want to support as many people as we can."

A big focus of the larder is giving the younger generation of the town the best opportunities in life, with Rizvana emphasising the importance of creating connections with local businesses like Daylesford Organic Farm and Blenheim Palace that have in turn offered paid and volunteer jobs to users of the larder.

For the food services, the larder works alongside local farms, supermarkets, and even allotment growers to source short-dated and surplus healthy food products, with all of the leftover produce being sent to other foodbanks or farmers to use as animal feed.

The larder often arranges for locals to pick the vegetables themselves from the farms, giving those who have perhaps never set foot on a working farm a taste of that lifestyle.

The larder works on a weekly subscription basis, with users paying £3.50 per week to take up to 14 items from the larder. The money goes to the Didcot charity SOFEA to pay for their administration and transportation of the food costs.

To fund the larder, Rizvana and the team have organised a series of fundraising events, including the popular Christmas meal delivery scheme. The group has also been awarded a number of community grants, enabling them to continue supporting the town.

"Food is the hook, and it gets people through the door and is the conversation starter, but we offer much more than food; people often say they look forward to Thursdays because of the social aspect.

"We know that one of the reasons people don’t access support is because of the stigma attached to asking for support, so we have presented the larder in a way that matches the Cotswolds aesthetic so that people don’t feel marginalised.

“Initially, the larder was a service to provide food for people and stop surplus food from going to waste, but it has now become a social hub in Chipping Norton. There’s a queue for an hour every week before we open because people enjoy coming and chatting to their friends here."

Another popular initiative the larder ran was to provide new starters at the town’s secondary school with all of the stationary and books they required for the academic year.

The group was also the first in the town to locate and offer warm spaces to the residents throughout the winter months, utilising rooms in the town hall and the leisure centre to organise free yoga, soft play, and senior swimming sessions.

Volunteer and user of the larder, Nicola Menage, first discovered the larder through word of mouth and by observing the long line of people waiting for the larder to open on Thursdays.

Since joining the team two years ago, Nicola has found a great sense of community when helping out at the Guildhall. She said: "I first started volunteering at one of the farms, collecting eggs and cleaning out the hen houses.

"With the lockdown, I noticed that the community really grew. People were talking much more to each other on dog walks or in the street, and I was very keen to keep that going once the restrictions had been lifted, and this was the best opportunity for that.

"Volunteering here, you get to meet all sorts of different people that I wouldn’t normally talk to, even standing in the queue, you meet a lot of people. There are a lot of lonely people, so it's nice to be able to have these conversations."

Nicola says that the larder has also connected new members of the Chipping Norton community, like the Ukrainian refugees in the town, to people and businesses they may not have met otherwise.

She added: "We have had an influx of Ukrainians to the town, and it's been really lovely for them to see regular people because you wouldn't really get that in a supermarket.

"It's completely more than just a food larder; everyone adores Rizvana, and it’s really brought the community together; people from all different walks of life come together; it's fantastic."

For more information, visit facebook.com/profile.php?id=100070968600639 or sofea.uk.com/community-larder/the-chippy-larder/