Students leaving Jesmond for the holidays are being encouraged to donate spare food in their cupboards to a new Covid-safe, contactless collection service that will relay it to the city’s foodbanks.

For the second time this year, Oscar Slacke, founder of Street Art Initiative, is offering to pick-up unwanted food from students in Jesmond and the surrounding area as they leave their term-time accommodation to return home for Christmas. He will then deliver the provisions to Newcastle East Foodbank on Heaton Road as well as to St Vincent’s Support Centre on New Bridge Street.

Slacke, a former Newcastle University student, has been advertising his service on online forums used by students, listing the items that foodbanks are particularly keen to receive.

Speaking to JesmondLocal, Slacke said: “As students, we’re quite lucky in the position we’re in. We’ve got a roof over our head, we’ve got food and it’s nice to be able to give back.”

When he first offered the service in June this year, more than 500 items were donated by students in Jesmond and elsewhere. Slacke said he is offering the service again this Christmas, “because I know how much it helps the different charities that need it across Newcastle and how much they need stuff in the run-up to Christmas”.

Slacke says he felt a need to become more involved with charities that tackle food insecurity after he spoke to a man on a street in Jesmond who had recently become homeless. “I just got chatting to him. He was in such a state of distress and anxiety, and he had no clue what was going on. You feel really helpless in that situation. It took me aback quite a lot because I hadn’t really experienced anything like that before.”

Slacke set up the charity Street Art Initiative which helps disadvantaged artists, and also began working with larger charities, including St Vincent’s, which meets needs in Byker and Walker, areas which score highly in the government’s measures of deprivation.

Rebecca Stevenson-Read, who is a centre co-ordinator at St Vincent’s, told JesmondLocal that since the pandemic, the charity has seen a 300% increase in people coming forward for support. As well as welcoming regular clients, Stevenson-Read said that “we have noticed since March that a lot of families are really, really struggling in the Newcastle area.”

The centre helps to support people in Newcastle with a variety of needs, including food insecurity. It runs a drop-in service on Tuesdays at Vinnie’s Café on New Bridge Street where take-away meals are offered from 11 am-2pm alongside food parcels and toiletries.

“A lot of the people that we talk to had families, had good jobs, had warm houses, and then a couple of bad things happened that led to their lives imploding,” said Stevenson-Read. “We support people in need, without judgment.”

She said St Vincent’s is looking to expand the services it offers, and emphasised the need for donations in order to do this. “We want to start offering welfare advice as part of Vinnie’s Café drop-ins, because we know the people that come are often in crisis in other areas of their lives. But we would need to pay a welfare adviser to be here.”

If you would like to donate spare food items for Oscar Slacke to collect, you can contact him on 07472 786 872 until Friday 18th December.

You can find out how to donate directly to St Vincent’s through its donation page, or to Newcastle East Food Bank here.