The time for celebration is very nearly upon us! Thanksgiving feasts with family and special evening's spent around a dining table with good friends and good food. As we look forward to these celebrations over the festive season, we would like to give back and support the wonderful work of The Feed.

The Feed is a social enterprise based in Norwich with a mission to motivate change in people to prevent poverty, hunger and homelessness through various community projects. To support these life changing projects and services, we are donating 10% of profits made on the Ando Dining Edit between Monday 21st to Monday 28th November directly to The Feed.  

Shop the Ando Dining Edit and receive 30% off

We met with Chris from The Feed to chat more about their mission, how our donation will help the community, and ways in which you can support The Feed going forwards.  

How did The Feed come about?

The Feed, previously known as Leap, opened in 2008 as a social enterprise with its roots in helping vulnerable people in Norwich, particularly those sleeping rough. We helped people out of homelessness by providing them with training in a commercial kitchen, encouraging them and giving them the practical skills to move forwards towards employment. In 2018 The Feed opened its first cafe on Prince of Wales Road and despite the challenges of the Covid Pandemic, we went on to open four more cafes and our social supermarket through 2021 and 2022. Our cafes and our catering business serve delicious homemade food and also generate most of our income. This enables us to help fund our work supporting our community. 

What is the mission behind The Feed?

Our ultimate mission is to prevent poverty, hunger and homelessness in Norwich. Passionate about food and people, we run cafes and a catering enterprise which produce delicious homemade food to generate much of our income and in turn help us achieve this mission.

The cafes are safe spaces where we help people who have faced, or are facing, barriers to employment such as homelessness, substance misuse, a history of offending and learning difficulties by improving their mental health. Everything we do works towards our vision of ‘a community free from poverty’. 

What projects are you currently running? 

At the heart of our work, amongst other projects including our Bloom and Nourish programmes, is our Supported Work Experience programme. This is how our clients learn new skills, build their confidence and motivation, and develop new positive routines so that they can move forward into employment.

This 10 week programme provides supported work experience within our cafes for adults who face barriers of employment with an aim to help build their self esteem in a positive working environment, as well as give them practical, transferrable skills for the workplace.

The donation from Birdie Fortescue will go towards funding a clients journey through this programme.

How can people support The Feed?

• We have just launched our Christmas hampers, containing great Norfolk produce. Each hamper sold supports us in our mission and they make fore great gifts! You can order your hamper here.
• Visit our cafes and help fund our projects! We serve delicious homemade food, made by clients within our programme. 
• Volunteers are an important part of our team at The Feed. There are a range of rewarding roles to suit the time commitment you can make. We welcome applications from all sections of the community. Read more about our roles here.
• We aim to generate much of our income from the delicious food we sell in our cafes and by catering for events. This means we don't run a big programme of fundraising events ourselves, however, keep an eye on our social media accounts and the news section on this website as we have one or two irons in the fire! Of course if you have a fundraising challenge you are planning and would like to support us we'd be delighted. We use the JustGiving platform for fundraising, link here.