A soup kitchen in Leeds is seeing a hundred people a week coming to seek help as bills and food prices skyrocket.
Neruka's Soul Food Soup Kitchen, based out of the Church of Jesus Christ Apostolic, has been helping people in the Harehills area since 2009 but has seen an increase in the need for its services. Many new faces have also been seen in the kitchen as people struggle to make ends meet.
Neruka White runs the Soup Kitchen along with a group of volunteers and has said she is “broken” over the numbers of people needing help. During the pandemic, the numbers of people seeking help “quadrupled” at the kitchen to around 200 people a week before they began to decline again as things opened up.
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But those numbers have begun to creep back up with around 100 people a week now seeking help. Ms White said: “People that we’ve not met before coming in, people with between three and ten children in the family. They are coming in asking for, like, baby stuff.
“So we have a lot of parents who didn’t really ask before, are asking for baby milk, nappies and basically anything that babies need and toddlers.”
Much of the food the kitchen takes in comes from fair share and local food hubs. However, Ms White is concerned as she has been told the funding provided to the hubs is starting to come to an end, meaning the soup kitchen may struggle to provide in the future.
She said: “I’m broken, really you know? It’s really, really, very stressful because what do we say to mothers you know? It’s mothers who are coming mainly who’ve got 6, 7 ,8 ,9, 10 children. What do I say to them?
“I can’t give you the food that you normally do because we can no longer get it and we haven’t got the funding to go out and purchase this kind of food for you.
“We’re hoping and praying that something will be done. That even though they’re saying that the funding is going to run out, they will be able to get some kind of funding to continue. Maybe not as much as before, but something that will support them because otherwise children are going to be really in trouble.”
Ms White also said a large number of the people who come in asking for help are in work and said even older people were coming in for food in a situation she described as “heartbreaking”. However, she also took the time to point to the work the “wonderful” volunteers do at the kitchen to help people feel welcome.
In the end, Ms White said the government needed to do more to help soup kitchens and food banks like Soul Food to keep doing their work. She said: “It seems kind of difficult to say the government should do this and the government should do that, but the government is there to kind of manage the resources and manage how they take care of the nation.
“They need to really connect with people who are on the ground because they can’t stay in Whitehall and legislate their way out of this kind of chaos.
“They really do need to be connecting with people in the grassroots, those of us who are actually serving the people, those who are actually seeing what’s happening and try to connect with us as well as provide and find out what resources we need.
“If we stopped doing what we are doing because of a lack of resources then what’s going to happen?”
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