Submitted by Harry Wild.
A heart-warming initiative launched by chefs to help provide healthy and tasty food for hard-pressed NHS workers is expanding into Bristol.
Fosters Events Catering are supporting ‘Food4Heroes’ by producing, transporting and serving 300+ meals daily for frontline NHS staff at Southmead Hospital with the possibility of this being extended to other NHS sites in Bristol and the South West.
Food4Heroes – which has secured huge support in just a week – was prompted by a heart-rending online appeal by NHS worker, Dawn Bilborough, who was unable to buy food in her local supermarket after completing a 48-hour shift.
The new scheme allocates a daily budget of £1.50 per day for food, so feeding Southmead Hospital alone will cost over £3,000 a week. Each additional hospital needs donations along those levels to support the initiative. Food4Heroes has presently raised over £35k to date and seeks to raise more much needed funds through public donations to its website.
Inspired into action, the Fosters team are volunteering their spare time to support this great cause.
CEO of Fosters Events Catering, Neil Lodge said: “With commercial production kitchens being redundant at the present time, we felt this amazing initiative was just a small in which Fosters could support and give back to the valued work of so many dedicated NHS workers. It creates a positive project that the team at Fosters could focus on during these incredibly challenging times.”
Food4Heroes was launched in Yorkshire on Tuesday 24th March by Amanda Guest, of Guest Dining, and her brother, John Brownhill. It has since won the support of Ricky Wilson of the Kaiser Chiefs & Dr Who Jodie Whittaker.
To date, they have supplied over 2,400 meals at Huddersfield Royal Infirmary and raised £39,042 through donations.
Co-founder of Food4Heroes, Amanda Guest said, “We are absolutely delighted by the response of the business community and local people in Yorkshire and it’s fantastic that Fosters Events Catering is getting involved for the South West.
“Looking ahead we want to roll this out nationally and the early support has been phenomenal!”
For more information and how to donate see www.food4heroes.co.uk.
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