Laura Winningham

Laura Winningham, CEO of City Harvest London, is a co-founder of London’s first large scale, last-mile, food redistribution effort to connect surplus food with those facing hunger.

Laura explained some of the key aims and objectives for City Harvest’s mission to ensure that everybody has an absolute right to food, nutrition, community support and education.

• City Harvest delivers high quality surplus food, not leftover food for leftover people

• City Harvest delivers, free, to over 300 community programmes only the nourishing foods that we ourselves would feed ourselves and our families

• Food surplus redistribution work has social effects that are more than just feeding people calories.  They connect people together, give them safe spaces to be able to connect positively with the food system.

• Food brings people together.   It is not just soup kitchens to which City Harvest deliver. They deliver to places that make people’s lives a bit better.  Choirs for the homeless, after school adventure playgrounds, day centres for the elderly who face social  isolation,  groups trying to help teens stay out of gangs, secure shelters for trafficked women. Our partner organisations in the community use the food to bring people together, which in turn reduces loneliness and isolation.

• In the age of eco-anxiety, City Harvest provide a way to actually take action.  Protesting is fine but every item of unused edible food that you direct to people rather than landfill, protects the environment from 3.8x that items weight in greenhouse gases released when food decomposes.

Laura spoke at our The Politics of Food & Debate at City Hall where you would have discovered more about City Harvest’s work and the value and detail of distributing surplus food – Find out what happened here!