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15
Mar
The Harrogate charity pioneer looking for one last job
Twelve years ago, a weighty report commissioned by St Mark’s Church in Harrogate laid bare the extent of unmet social support needs in the town. It looked at domestic abuse and dementia, affordable housing and fostering, street drinking and support for carers, among many other things.
But one issue stood out above all others. In its conclusion, the report stated:
Isolation and loneliness were the main concerns raised. Many people are crying out for community.
The 118-page Minding the Gaps report was written by a member of the St Mark’s congregation, Dr Michelle Hayes, and a few years later she launched an initiative that set out to tackle the town’s number-one problem, and a couple of others besides.
She set up Resurrected Bites, which works to reduce food waste and food poverty, while also providing a social space for people who might otherwise suffer from isolation.
It runs pay-as-you-feel cafés in Harrogate, Knaresborough and Killinghall, and its community groceries scheme provides essentials for people struggling to make ends meet.
Dr Hayes told the Stray Ferret:
When we opened our first café at St Mark’s and saw people queuing out of the door, I thought ‘Wow – this is really needed!’.
Customers at the Resurrected Bites Give As You Can café in Killinghall.
But now, after eight years at the helm, Dr Hayes feels it’s time to move on and has announced she’s stepping down.
She said:
To be in one role for eight years is quite unusual for me. I’ve got one more job in me before I reach retirement age, but I want to stay in Harrogate and in the charity sector.
Driven by faith
This could be good news for any local charity casting around for a new chief executive, not least because she has plenty of transferrable skills.
She started off as a research scientist with a doctorate in antibiotic resistance, and was a project manager in clinical trials, working on drugs for Alzheimers and cancer pain.
She then changed tack and took up a post at St Mark’s to oversee the outreach and mission, with the grand-sounding job title Kingdom Life Director.
She said:
I’m very much driven by my faith, and I felt that God was telling me there was stuff I could make more of an impact with.
I only came to faith properly in 2008, but it’s been absolutely instrumental in my life ever since.
Track record
Any doubts recruiters may have about Dr Hayes’ skills should be dispelled by her track record. After all, what she has achieved in less than a decade is quite remarkable.
Resurrected Bites – which is made up of a charity for the groceries and a community interest company (CIC) for the cafés – is run by six members of staff, only one of them full-time, and 170 volunteers. They do everything from clearing tables to making early-morning trips to pick up donated food from supermarkets and manufacturers.
The organisation now diverts 1.5 tonnes of food waste from landfill every week, and last year, it helped 1,100 people through the community groceries scheme and served more than 5,800 covers in its cafés.
Michelle Hayes with Resurrected Bites volunteers Sue Ward, Sarah Lofthouse and Justin Hardcastle.
Human impact
But it is the human impact of all these figures that matters most to Dr Hayes.
She said:
So many of our grocery customers tell us what a lifeline it’s been. One single dad said it had enabled him to have his son to stay, because he could actually feed him.
A lady came into the Harrogate café a few months ago and thanked us. She had recently been bereaved and everybody was saying she needed counselling. But she said she didn’t – she just needed to get out and go somewhere where she could talk to people and process her grief.
As well as food, some retailers donate other things that make life more liveable. One woman told us how proud she was to be able to have flowers by her front door, and that it was the spark that convinced her she was able to turn her life around.
The feedback from people about what a difference it’s made to their lives is what’s made it possible for me to carry on for so long.
Bringing stability
Waitrose, Marks & Spencer, Aldi and Lidl are all donors, as is Harrogate’s Regal Fruiterers, and other items come from FareShare, which intercepts waste food at the manufacturing level. But Res Bites, as many know it, is always looking for more sources of food and funding.
Dr Hayes said:
The challenge has always been getting enough money to keep it running, and also just making sure we’ve got enough resources to meet the need – there is a huge amount of need out there.
We’re still very reliant on grants and fundraising, but I’ve managed to get us to a place where we’re in a much more stable position.
This is no mean feat. When the Stray Ferret spoke to Dr Hayes two years ago, Resurrected Bites’ expenditure was running at about £16,000 per month, resulting in a shortfall of about £9,000 to be made up from grants or fundraising.
It was a lot of money to find, so how did she do it?
She said:
I just wrote loads and loads of grant bids and was a lot more successful than I thought I would be!
A member shopping at one of Resurrected Bites' community grocery stores.
Support from high places
As a result, the charity has received £25,000 from National Powergrid, £20,000 from the National Lottery fund, £15,000 from North Yorkshire Council’s household support fund, and also receives portions of the locality budgets of various local councillors, including Paul Haslam, Chris Aldred, Hannah Gostlow, Matt Walker, Monika Slater and Michael Schofield.
It helps too that the cafés are so popular. The one at St Wilfrid’s serves about 40 people each week, but the one on Gracious Street in Knaresborough serves as many as 60, and the café in Killinghall routinely welcomes up to 100 people per week.
Dr Hayes said:
Some people have got to know each other through the cafés and like them so much that they meet up at all three every week.
She doesn’t yet know what exactly she’d like to do next, but she has some useful words of advice for anyone taking on her leadership role at Resurrected Bites. She said:
They needn’t worry – I shan’t be on the board. It wouldn’t be healthy for me to still be hanging around when somebody else is trying to realise their own new vision.
They’ll be lucky to work with an amazing team who definitely go above and beyond.
My advice would be: clearly articulate your vision, and then let your team get on with it, because they’ll do a great job.
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