Tanisha Bramwell remembers with horror the day her food bank in Dewsbury ran out of food.
The cost of living crisis was hitting the West Yorkshire town so hard, that donors no longer had the spare funds to help out.
Tanisha, 27, says: “It was absolutely gone. It was absolutely bare. We sat down and at that moment, all the team was just kind of deflated.”
They feared it was coming as they’d seen a drop in the quality of supplies. “We used to get milk, bread, eggs, and things like that,” explains Tanisha.
Then the donations at Bramwell’s Foodbank typically became just a few tins of food.
“You can see they don’t have the capacity really to be donating and they just want to do that bit and help out,” she says.
On top of this many of the people that initially donated to the service when it was first founded at the start of the pandemic have now been driven to become customers themselves.
“The majority of people that are part of our regular listings, they used to donate weekly, whether it was financial, or they used to drop off food every week for us. And they’re now users,” says Tanisha.
But this all came to a head last month when Tanisha realised that, with just a hundred pounds in the bank and a few tins on the shelves, she now had the upsetting task of turning people away. “They were in shock, they were kind of apologising, saying ‘I’m so sorry for reaching out’,” she says. “It was a really hard conversation to have.
“It can be very hard for people to get to that point where they think, ‘You know what, I really need help. I’m going to reach out, and ask for help’.
“And then to actually get there and do that and make progress. And then in return to hear ‘We’re so sorry we also need help right now, we don’t know how we are going to support you guys’.”
Since going public with a social media post explaining they needed help the food bank has had an influx of supplies from the local community, but Tanisha is not sure this will last long.
“It’s very difficult,” she says. “People expect food banks to be funded with loads of money and everything’s okay, everything’s great. And it’s just not the case at all.
“During the first lockdown, there were so many funding streams. But unfortunately, what’s come out of the pandemic is there are so many other social needs. And funders are having to prioritise different needs.”
