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I don’t know whether it is OK to post these kind of requests, so I’m sorry if not. Just we are desperate for someone to help us out on this (read on)…

This evening, if you’re like most people, much of the food you’ll see on your plate will have arrived as part of a complex, global, interdependent food system. In the UK alone we now import more food than we produce including 80% of our fruit. We have lost 80% of our orchards and the number of local farmers is heading the same way. As part of the “supermarket generation”, we have become disconnected with where our food comes from, how to grow it, and what real food tastes like.

We buy car insurance, home insurance, life insurance, even pet insurance, but have you ever thought about whether we have food insurance? Food security is rapidly becoming the unspoken number 1 issue in the UK.

Enter Foodshare – a first response to the UK’s food crisis.

WHAT IS FOODSHARE?
Foodshare is a Social and Local Community Initiative launched in June 2009. Like all good ideas, it developed as a result of trying to solve a problem. Mark Desvaux and Dan Spencer, Foodshare founders, were on the allotment staring at a courgette plant that seemed to never stop giving. In fact, they had courgettes coming out of their ears. Neighbours ran a mile when they saw Mark coming as they still hadn’t used up the last batch he had previously given them.

Then one phone call changed everything. Mark talked with the Clifford, the chef at the Children’s Hospice down the road, and asked whether they could use some courgettes. Clifford almost bit his hand off, and without really knowing what was to follow, the idea of Foodshare was born. Within a week, the Milton allotment had a Foodshare “Donation Station” set up where other growers joined in, placing their surpluses. Within three months, over £1,000 of freshly grown, mainly organic fruit and veg was donated to the hospice. Not only was food waste reduced dramatically, but the charities food bill plummeted, and the children and their families at the Hospice were enjoying some of the healthiest and freshest food available.

Since then we have just been hanging on to the project by its coat tails! Putting the model out there on the web (http://www.foodshare.co.uk) has inspired people from as far afield as New York and New Zealand! We have also featured on various forms of media: BBC Breakfast, Radio 4 Gardeners Question Time and soon to be on ITV news to name a few. We have also partnered with the RHS schools gardening scheme (over 10,000 schools) and Garden Organic (6,000 schools) to get the scheme going in schools across the country and beyond.

HOW CAN YOU HELP?
A lot of the success of the scheme can be attributed to the great power of the internet in acting as a tool for community creation, cohesion and collaboration. We have some great project that use the web as a medium for the Foodshare project to really measure the value of local food. We are looking for volunteer web developers to help us expand our web platform and tools that are integral to the way we run. In particular we are looking for anyone with experience in WordPress plugin development or a PHP guru who would be willing to learn a bit about wordpress plugins (its not too difficult once you have skimmed over the WordPress documentation).

SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE…
We are also open to offers of help from other people with different skills! If you think you have what it takes to change the world with us, then please get in touch!

Please note that this/these position(s) is/are unpaid and therefore voluntary until we have the funding necessary to employ someone.