A café set up to reduce food waste, loneliness and food poverty in Harrogate has been forced to close due to financial pressures.
Resurrected Bites’ Give As You Can café has been held at St Paul’s United Reformed Church in Harrogate on Wednesdays, but low footfall and high costs have made it unviable.
Michelle Hayes, director and founder of Resurrected Bites, told the Stray Ferret:
“We’re making such a loss that we’re getting to the point where we can’t cover staff wages. We can’t sustain it.”
Resurrected Bites also runs a community groceries scheme with bases in Harrogate and Knaresborough for people in food poverty, as well as two other cafés, at Gracious Street Methodist Church in Knaresborough on Fridays and at Killinghall Methodist Church on Thursdays, which she said are still doing well.
Resurrected Bites’ expenditure for the first three months of this financial year varied between £15,000 and £17,000 per month, resulting in a shortfall of £8,000 to £10,000 to be made up from grants or fundraising.
To help stabilise the organisation, Ms Hayes has split it, with the Resurrected Bites charity as the main fundraising body covering the community groceries and environmental aspects of preventing food waste. As a charity, any donations are eligible for Gift Aid, boosting them by 25%.
But the cafés are not eligible for charitable status because there are no restrictions on who may provide custom.
Ms Hayes said:
“Charitable status would restrict us to only serving people who are lonely or in food poverty. We feel that our existing model of focusing on the environmental aspects of food waste enables us to support people who are in food poverty or are lonely without stigmatising them.
“Legally, the charity cannot support the shortfall in finances for the community interest company, and so we have to ensure the cafés raise enough revenue to cover their costs.
“That’s why we had to make the very difficult decision to close the Harrogate café whilst we consider how we can generate more income to cover its costs.
“We’re hoping that it’s temporary. We may be able to find a new venue with a bigger space so that we can get more people through, and attract a wider range of customers who can pay more.
“Once we get through this rough patch, I think we’ll be alright.”
Photo: The Killinghall Methodist Church cafe run by Resurrected Bites remains open.
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