Available
103 St Vincent St, Glasgow G2 5EA, UK
e are aiming to provide accommodation, support and 250,000 food and essentials packs to homeless people over winter. This will bring our distribution of emergency food packs and essential items to over 1 million, since the pandemic began.
Social Bite began life as a small cafe in Edinburgh, Scotland, in August 2012. We became involved in the homelessness issue, when a young homeless man named Peter Hart came into the cafe one day to ask us for a job. When we offered this young man employment, this was the origin of an unexpected 9 years of charitable work and campaigning on the homelessness issue.
We started to offer more homeless people jobs, as we got more engaged in the issue. After a few months, we introduced a “Pay it Forward” system in the cafes where customers could buy some food in advance for homeless people to get later on.
This has led to us becoming a major employer of homeless people as well as the largest provider of free freshly made free food in the UK to those in need. We normally give out over 140,000 items of food and hot drinks every year through our network of cafes and have distributed over 540,000 food packs during the pandemic alone. We also have a restaurant, Vesta Bar & Kitchen, formerly called ‘Home’, which opened in 2016 and which provides weekly sit down meals for 40 people experiencing homelessness and food poverty, as well as training opportunities for our supported employees.
Our kitchens, cafes and teams will be entirely re-deployed to produce and deliver food and supplies to those who need them most for the duration of this outbreak. We will be working with partners throughout Scotland to ensure that food and essential supplies can reach the following people:
- Homeless People
- Families that were relying on free school meals and now have no access
- Those who have been made redundant due to the crisis and are in food poverty
