pay-as-you-feel cafe Archives

Opening date for new pay-as-you-feel cafe in Killinghall

A pay-as-you-feel cafe will open in Killinghall next month thanks to food waste organisation Resurrected Bites.

It will run its weekly cafe in the newly-refurbished Killinghall Methodist Church every Thursday from 11.30am to 2pm.

The grand opening takes place on Thursday, May 11, when the team of volunteers will be serving hot meals made using food that would otherwise have gone to landfill.

Customers are invited to pay whatever they can afford for their lunches, as well as a selection of hot and cold drinks, pastries and cakes.

Ian Booth, who has run the kitchen for the organisation’s cafes in Harrogate and Knaresborough for the last two years, previously told the Stray Ferret:

“Often, people don’t come because they think it’s just for people who are struggling. We’re absolutely dependent on people who can afford to give generously.

“At the same time, it’s great when people come who can’t afford to, knowing that someone who is struggling has had a good hot meal.”

As well as the weekly cafe, a new toddler and parent creative group is being launched to run in the morning. Therapeutic Creatives will offer creative sessions for children as well as activities for parents and carers, aiming to make the first few years of parenthood easier.

Participants will then have an area set aside in the cafe for them to enjoy lunch together and build new friendships.

Resurrected Bites, a community interest company, also runs community groceries in Harrogate and Knaresborough. They allow people who are struggling to afford food to get a weekly shop for a small sum.

The organisation uses food from supermarkets and other commercial businesses to fill its grocery shelves and create its cafe menus. All the food is still safe to eat, but does not meet the exacting requirements of retailers.

The Stray Ferret supported Resurrected Bites as part of our first ever Christmas appeal in 2022. With support from the public and match funding of £5,000 from Harrogate firm Techbuyer, we raised more than £32,000 in just four weeks.

Stray Ferret Christmas Appeal: ‘My life collapsed like a wicket’

This year’s Stray Ferret Christmas Appeal is for Resurrected Bites in Harrogate and Knaresborough. Today, Vicky meets a local man who is both a community grocery member and a café volunteer. Please give generously to support local people who are struggling this Christmas. They need your help.

The people who rely on Resurrected Bites are no different to anyone else. They have experiences, careers, aspirations and needs just as the rest of us do.

Sometimes, though, circumstances lead even the most conventional person down a road they never expected.

Justin Hardcastle tells his story.

“I worked in IT security recruitment as an account manager and lived in Harrogate most of my life. I’ve also lived in Leeds, London and Majorca, and in Austria for five years.

“In 2005, I found my mum hanging. I cut her down and gave her mouth-to-mouth and saved her life. Unfortunately, the oxygen deprivation left her with brain damage.

“In 2017, I found my brother dead in his flat. I couldn’t revive him.

“In 2019, I lost my grandma, who was a second mum to me. My mum worked two jobs and me and my brother lived with our grandparents.

“It was three bad experiences. If you look at cricket, you’ve got three stumps: the first was my mum, my brother was the second and the third was my grandma. It just all collapsed.”

Justin struggled on for a while, but his mental health declined. He had to stop working and he lost his home.

Friends helped out, including paying for hotel rooms to give him somewhere to stay. Justin said he was enormously grateful, but he needed long-term stability.

He was put in touch with Lifeline, a Christian charity providing secure places to live and support for people in crisis. It gave Justin a flat shared with two other men.

With somewhere safe to stay, Justin was pointed towards Resurrected Bites and became a member of the community grocery.

It took months for his benefit payments to start being made, but he was still able to access food supplies.

Gracious Street grocery manager Carolyn said:

“When the system goes wrong, it can leave you with literally nothing.

“We try to tell people if you’ve got nothing, don’t feel you can’t come. If you go from work onto universal credit, there’s a minimum five weeks’ wait.

“We always say we will do you voucher shops until your money’s back on course.

“That’s why we need more people to know about us. People need to know and not to be ashamed. There’s no judgement.”

Settled in at home and getting to know the team at Resurrected Bites, Justin decided six months ago to become more involved.

He volunteers every Thursday in the community grocery, as well as doing alternate Fridays in the kitchen of the pay-as-you-feel café.

His interest in food stems from his childhood, cooking with his grandmother and his brother, who went on to work in hospitality.

Some of the meals created for the Resurrected Bites cafe, created from ingredients that would otherwise be thrown away

He said:

“I love coming here. It gives me a purpose. Everyone is so friendly and I feel like I’m giving something back.

It’s heart-warming and beneficial for me, just to be part of a team and know I’m appreciated. I’m never late. I’m always early.

“You never know what you’re going to get. There was a week when we had crates of apples or strawberries or a ton of spring onions. You just never know and that’s what’s good. I’m not a chef, I just like cooking.

“From quite easily going to Sainsbury’s or Morrison’s and looking round and buying what you want to coming here, it makes you think more about food. You adapt to the situation and what you are going to get.

“It’s good for my mental health, I think, ‘what can I use, what can I make?’ it’s making me think and want to produce things differently that I wouldn’t have made.

“I feel like I contribute – I give as much as I can. Thinking about where I was, if it wasn’t for Resurrected Bites, Lifeline and my network of friends, I don’t know where I would be now.”

Having felt the benefit of Resurrected Bites in so many ways, Justin is determined to use his experience to help others.

He recognises just how easily things can change for anyone, as they did for him.

“When I worked in Leeds, I would quite happily go and have a coffee and a croissant for breakfast. Lunchtime, I’d go for a meal deal, and on an evening I might cook or have a take-away.

“That’s £15 a day. To go from that to having £3 for your weekly shop…

“I’ve changed my life and, going forward, I’m going to change my life. I want to feel I can support and help other people.

“I would like to share my experiences and possibly do something, whether it’s in volunteering or paid. I’ve got a lot to give and once I’m rehabilitated, I can show people what can happen.

“I can’t thank the organisations I’ve found and I’m part of enough. I’ve got a purpose. It’s a new start.”

Nobody in the Harrogate district should go hungry this Christmas.

It costs £300 to run the community grocery for one day. Please help to keep it open for everyone who relies on it.

Click here to contribute now. Thank you.

Stray Ferret Christmas Appeal: Making hearty meals from food waste

Like many people, Ian Booth’s job changed significantly when the covid pandemic began.

He had spent the previous year as manager of Resurrected Bites’ pay-as-you-feel café at St Mark’s Church.

In early 2020, along with the community interest company’s founder, Michelle Hayes, he had opened a new café at Gracious Street Methodist Church in Knaresborough and was in the process of launching another, at West Park United Reformed Church in Harrogate.

That March, they found themselves intercepting four tons of food waste each week and distributing it to people who were struggling.

Volunteers collected surplus food from supermarkets five days a week instead of two, and hospitality businesses forced to close their doors emptied their kitchens into vans and car boots.

Ian said:

“I wasn’t really anything like aware of the food poverty issue in the Harrogate area – not the scale of it. I realised people were going to be struggling, but not to this extent.

“As we were anticipating all this food waste, my immediate thought was to provide food to people who were struggling. Michelle had the same idea.

“We tapped into a huge food poverty issue in the area. We didn’t want to abandon that when the pandemic ended.

“That’s when we thought about adopting the community grocery model.”

Meanwhile, in 2021, Ian was back in the kitchen at the cafés, drawing on skills he had developed while living and working as a pastor at a church in France with his family.

“I’ve always enjoyed cooking – I do lots of it and in big quantities. We have five kids and we did so many church events.

“Because we’ve got a large family and always lived on a fairly low income, it’s a case of ‘see what’s cheap and make the most of it’.”

That experience is ideally suited to the demands of running the cafés, which take their ingredients from the Resurrected Bites warehouse.

Anything that can’t be sold in the community groceries will find its way onto the menus: catering packs of rice or chopped tomatoes, bacon, couscous, chickpeas, beef, potatoes, carrots… In late summer, a huge volume of apples arrived each week as people found their trees were producing more than they could use at home.

Ian said:

“I enjoy the creative bit – it can be very challenging. My mind starts whirring instantly about menus.

“We try and produce five main courses, a soup, a couple of desserts.”

When I visit Gracious Street Methodist Church one Friday lunchtime, roast beef and vegetables are on the menu.

It is delicious: hearty and warming on a cold day, a reminder of classic home cooking. Ian has exacting standards, though, and is constrained by what has arrived at the warehouse:

“We would normally never do roast beef without Yorkshire puddings, but we didn’t have any eggs.”

The tables are packed. Single people, pairs of friends, young families – they all share the space and make cheerful conversation as they order and eat.

The Gracious Street café is the busier of the two, I’m told, no doubt because it runs on the same day the community grocery is open in another room at the church. Knaresborough itself is a popular place to be on a Friday morning and some of the customers tell me they call in to the café after doing their shopping.

The cafés are not just aimed at people on tight budgets who might struggle to afford to eat out elsewhere, though.

Ian said:

“Often, people don’t come because they think it’s just for people who are struggling. We’re absolutely dependent on people who can afford to give generously.

“At the same time, it’s great when people come who can’t afford to, knowing that someone who is struggling has had a good hot meal.”

Many benefits

Ian is a passionate environmentalist – one of the reasons for his involvement in a project that aims to cut food waste.

He has been surprised by the many other benefits people get from Resurrected Bites. Not only does it support people to feed themselves and their families with dignity by paying for their shops, it also helps people who might have been struggling in other ways.

“Quite a number of people have come in and volunteered who have said, ‘this has been so good for my mental health’. It’s the sort of thing I wouldn’t have thought of.

“We had one guy who was helping with cooking. He was a good cook. He has gone on to work for a local charity, cooking for them. It’s brilliant.

“They asked me for a reference for him and I was able to say I couldn’t think of anybody better suited to this job. He has got that kind of compassionate heart.

“It’s great to have that experience and go on to use it in such a positive way.”

Resurrected Bites has close ties to local charities and organisations. There isn’t much that can’t be used in its cafes or community groceries, but when there is, it’s redirected to someone who can make use of it.

Volunteers helped to reopen Resurrected Bites’ cafes after covid

Approaching retirement in a couple of years, Ian is looking to cut down his hours at the cafes over the coming months.

At the same time, a new café is being planned in Killinghall. It means new volunteers and a new café manager will be needed – and Ian can only reflect on what a privilege it will be for those involved:

“I always think one of the best things about my job is the people I work with.

“We’re totally reliant on volunteers. The sort of people that volunteer are nice people, kind and caring, thinking of others.

“I just feel so blessed to have so many nice people to work with.”

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Many benefits