It has been a busy six months for Rhubarb Farm. We are currently supporting around 50 volunteers a week, providing food bags to approximately 30 households a week, and holding a weekly community lunch in our café. We have also been able to get more activities up and running and hold some events for the local community.
We were able to reopen our weekly Community Café for older people back in September. This was in response to decreased demand for delivered hot meals as people started to get out more.
In October we were able to restart our sports sessions at the Arc. This is a local leisure centre where volunteers go once a week to take part in accessible team games.
We have also reinstated music sessions and a new Tai Chi session.
We held our annual Pumpkin Picking event and this year held a family Hallowe’en event. Volunteers helped decorate the Farm with cobwebs, spiders, and witches and create fun games for children to take part in. The Halloween event was attended by around 50 people both locally and further afield. This involvement of the local community breaks down barriers and helps people understand our work, as well as gives volunteers a lot of interest and fun in helping run an event that the community attends.
We held our first Christmas Market in December. Despite terrible weather, we managed to raise £2000 for the Farm. £900 of this was from selling produce in our shop, which included jams, pickles, and chutneys made by our Food Champion using surplus fruit and vegetables.
All of the profit from the market has been reinvested back into the Farm.
We ended the year with a much-needed Christmas party for staff and volunteers, held in one of our polytunnels. We had a buffet lunch, party games, karaoke, and lots of laughs. It was a great way to end the year.
Awards
Rhubarb Farm was very proud to be awarded Organisation of the Year at the Voluntary Sector Awards (Chesterfield). On the same night, Anita Ollerenshaw our Farm Manager won Employee of the Year and Chris Manning (Volunteer) was nominated for the Long Service Volunteer Award. It was a real honour to share the evening with other voluntary services and see what the voluntary sector is achieving in the area.
So far, the funding from Vegware has brought paper bags for use in our Farm Shop and jars for the jams/chutneys and pickles that we sell. We have recently introduced a money-back scheme on jars to encourage customers to return any empties. It is hoped that this will encourage customers to recycle and mean over time we buy fewer new jars.