Extraordinary’ community response saves Kai Rescue, but concerns remain
A 4000% increase in community donations since last week has staved off the threat of closure for local food re-distribution service Kai Rescue.
But provider, the Nelson Environment Centre, said community food security networks in the region were “on the edge”, and the way they were funded needed to change.
Centre chief executive Andrew White said 80-90 people had donated sums ranging from $10 to over $2000 to Kai Rescue since last Wednesday, when the centre revealed it was $40,000 short of the amount needed to keep the service running.
Well over $20,000 was raised through donations during the week; a 4150% jump on donations the month before, he said.
With local community offerings including an e-bike to raffle and rent reduction – and a $10,000 grant coming down the pipeline from Nelson City Council – the programme now had close to the $270,000 needed to run for another year, White said.
The generosity of the community had been “pretty extraordinary”, he said
“We actually can’t really believe it.
“But I think people have really understood just how important Kai Rescue is.”
The charity picks up surplus food from local supermarkets, growers and other food outlets to help minimise food waste in Nelson Tasman – diverting over 1500 tonnes of food from landfill since its inception in 2017.
It then redistributes the food to social services and charities supporting people in the community. It now supplies more than 60 community groups across the region.
Amid a cost of living crisis, Kai Rescue had a growing waiting list of organisations that wanted to receive food, and those organisations also had their own waiting lists, White said.
But the charity, along with many other community organisations providing food security in the region, was increasingly struggling for funding.
“So many of us are on the edge, we survive year-to-year,” he said.
Kai Rescue was 100% dependent on funding, grants and donations, but grants and external funding had dried up in recent years, White said.
With around 60 volunteers helping run Kai Rescue each week, the service ran “pretty much on the sniff of an oily rag because of the generosity of our community”.
“To be doing it that efficiently, and still being on the edge, I think is really concerning.”
Nelson Environment Centre’s ability to subsidise Kai Rescue had reduced as costs to provide its recycling and re-use services continued to rise, while the centre kept its charges the same, providing for people who couldn’t afford to buy things new.
White hoped Kai Rescue would continue to receive a food security grant in the region of $50,000 from the Government, and significant funding from the Rātā Foundation.
But funding from council contestable grants was never 100% certain, with ever more community groups needing funding, he said.
“Sadly we end up competing with a lot of those other organisations to find funding.”
White said ideally there would be a shared grants approach among councils in the top of the South Island that incentivised collaboration between community organisations.
That should include a joint plan on what councils wanted to achieve, with funding scored on how well networked the organisations were with others in the field, he said.
It also needed to be easier for existing operations to get grants from funders, ranging from philanthropic organisations to Government agencies, which currently favoured new developments.
By Katy Jones, Nelson Mail
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