Communities Fund has provided £240 of match funding
No one in West Cornwall should go hungry
Penzance, Cornwall, United Kingdom
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Aim
We're raising £10,000 to bridge a critical funding gap, ensuring the Social Canteen continues to provide 450 fresh meals weekly
At Growing Links' Street Food Project, we believe everyone deserves a hot, nutritious meal. We're working to bridge a critical funding gap so we can continue serving around 450 freshly cooked meals every week to individuals experiencing homelessness, poverty, and hardship across West Cornwall.
Our Social Canteen provides more than just food; it offers a lifeline of support and community to those who need it most in our area. Your help will directly ensure these vital meals keep reaching people who rely on them daily.
Your support, in any amount, would mean so much to us and to the people we serve. Please consider contributing or sharing our campaign to help us continue this essential work.
Growing Links is building a resilient, climate-friendly local food system that benefits both people and nature across West Cornwall. We support people experiencing poverty, homelessness, poor mental health and social isolation through community food growing, surplus food redistribution, nutritious meals, cookery education and volunteering. We believe everyone should have access to healthy, locally produced food while protecting the environment for future generations. Our work reduces food waste, promotes regenerative growing, strengthens local food networks and helps communities adapt to climate change. By making nutritious food more accessible and affordable, we also improve financial wellbeing, enabling people to eat well, reduce household food costs and build healthier, more resilient communities.
Our beneficiaries are among the most vulnerable adults in the community for example those experiencing homeless and insecure housing, young adults, single parents and families with young children, older people, people experiencing poor physical and mental health - anyone experiencing food poverty and financial hardship.
The social canteen provides around 2000 hot meals every month - it also provides a safe, warm and dry place for individuals to spend time. Beneficiaries are encouraged to participate in mealtimes and contribute in whatever way feels manageable for them. That changes the relationship from one of giver and recipient to one of community. Overtime those relationships build trust, we are then able to signpost individuals to appropriate services such as housing, physical or mental health support, financial advice, addiction support and activities which reduce isolation.
We measure our success not only by meals served, volunteer hours given and food rescued from landfill but from the changes that follow. One of our most important measures of success is trust, the fact that people return, sit around a table and speak to us and allow us and others to support them. This is often the first step towards much larger changes in their lives.
Overtime we want to create a different model of community food infrastructure in West Cornwall. Places where good food, community, preventative health, growing, environmental action and social support come together. Ultimately we want to help build a local food system that looks after both people and the planet.
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 17th September 2026 at 10:14am