By Jill Stocks
One of Horsforth’s most beloved community projects celebrated its tenth birthday this week and regulars and volunteers were there in numbers to mark the occasion.
Horsforth Community Cafe started in 2016 and since then has served pay as you feel meals to thousands of hungry locals and reduced food waste into the bargain.
Every Sunday and Monday volunteers collect donations of food that would otherwise be wasted, and by Monday lunchtime there’s a delicious menu catering for all tastes with a filling meal to get the week off to a good start.
And of course there’s the social aspect. The cafe provides a great opportunity for people to have a good natter whilst they enjoy their meal, reducing social isolation in the community and providing an opportunity for laughs and discussion.
Penny Pinn is one of a team of volunteers who makes the community cafe such an asset to the Horsforth community. She said: “It’s been a really special occasion at Horsforth community cafe today.
“We started April 2016. Emma Moore started the cafe initiative through Horsforth Churches Together. Initially it was just once a fortnight. I started volunteering a few months later and it was such a success that from September 2016 we’ve been open every Monday throughout most of the year since then.”
Housed at the parish centre at St Margaret’s Church, the cafe makes use of donations from local Tesco stores, from Rethink, donations from locals and from a local gentleman who works as a rep for small shops in Yorkshire and the North East who provides donations of cakes and biscuits beyond best before that cannot be sold but can be used by the cafe.
The church does not charge them for the use of the parish centre but the cafe makes a contribution towards energy and cleaning costs. Any food donations collected that aren’t used at the cafe are redistributed for use at other local projects.
During Covid the cafe, like all local facilities, was unable to run in its usual fashion, but the team continued to minimise food waste and help the community by other means: “Unfortunately during Covid we couldn’t run the cafe so we became the food hub doing food parcels, and then we reopened in 2021 and we’ve just gone from strength to strength.”
To mark the tenth birthday there was a special menu, a raffle, and everyone took part in a quiz, with questions covering news events from the past ten years.
Volunteers from all walks of life combine to bring their skills and strengths to the team who make the smooth running of the cafe possible every week, and in 2022 their contribution was acknowledged with the Queens Award for Voluntary Service.
School pupils regularly also attend to volunteer and this week the regular team were joined by pupils from Horsforth Featherbank Primary School: “We have an amazing team of volunteers who help us doing all sorts of jobs from prepping the fruit and veg and cooking and serving and doing the mountain of washing up and collecting the surplus food.”
The project has also been instrumental in significantly reducing food waste and helping in the local community: “Over the ten years we’ve saved tonnes and tonnes of food from going to waste and the donations that people have made for their food has gone back into the local community to support good causes.”
“We’ve loved having everyone here today to celebrate our tenth birthday including Cllr Simon Dowling, leader of Horsforth Town Council, and we had a beautiful birthday cake donated by Truly Scrummy, so thank you to them for that. Mortons butchers provided the chicken which we paid for [from raffle takings] and it’s just been lovely to celebrate with everybody.”
Cllr Dowling had the honour of cutting the birthday cake after giving a vote of thanks to everyone involved in the community cafe. He said: “It just shows how much of a valued part of the Horsforth community the community cafe is. The fact that it is here for ten years and I want to pay special tribute to Penny and the team of volunteers that work tirelessly week in week out to deliver the cafe for so many residents within our local community.”
Horsforth Community Cafe is open on Mondays, except bank holidays and seasonal holidays, between 10am and 2pm, with lunch at 12pm, at the parish centre at St Margaret’s Church. More details can be found on their Facebook page.
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