FoodBank South Africa

We congratulate Patrick Andries and his team for this landmark achivement.

FoodBank Cape Town represents a merging of the Cape Town food delivery operations of Feedback Food Redistribution, the Lions Club, and The Robin Good Initiative. As Patrick put it, "this is the dawn of a new era of collaboration of resources, effort and capacity to attain the greater goal of eradicating poverty." This merged effort will allow huge synergies and, in time, enable the Cape Town team to do much more than the sum of their three founding parts. Good news indeed for the hungry of Cape Town!

The launch of FoodBank Cape Town is welcome news to people such as 60 year-old Cordelia Woniwe, who fosters 11 destitute children at her home. Cordelia says of the initiative “They help me so much. I get bread, vegetables and rice. Sometimes I get tins of stuff - three times a week.”

FoodBank Cape Town marked the "unofficial" opening of the doors of their 600 square metre warehouse in the Philippi Fresh Produce Market with a ceremony which was widely covered in the national media. Mondli Mbhele from the Department of Social Development represented our national government and Patrick welcomed him as "part of the FoodBank South Africa family".

Crispin Sonn, Chairperson of FoodBank South Africa (in the picture), also attended and made a moving speech. He noted that FoodBank South Africa is working closely with teams in several other parts of South Africa. We all hope and expect that it will not be long until we can report similiar celebrations elsewhere. Of course, our work does not stop in the cities. As Crispin noted at the Cape Town opening, "If you don't provide help in the rural areas you're going to have a huge spike in people coming into the cities seeking basic requirements such as food."

The team is planning a more "official" opening on 6 April once they've caught their breath. Watch this website for more details as and when we have them!