In the centre we provide older and vulnerable people with hot affordable meals at lunch time and run a café for the wider community on Thursday afternoon and Saturday morning, on a pay what you can basis. We also have a meal delivery service for older people in Teignmouth who aren't mobile, which provides a valuable service and lifeline for them. As well as enjoying our nutritionally balanced and delicious food, they get a welfare check from our delivery team and from their weekly phone call to take their menu choices. A freshly cooked hot meal is vitally important to their health and well-being as many rely on frozen ready meals the rest of the time. Approximately one third of our meal delivery clients are experiencing hardship and we provide their meals at no cost. Our paying clients pay £5 for lunch and £2 for dessert, so our meals are affordable.
For those that eat with us in the Centre the social interaction is of huge benefit, alongside an affordable and delicious meal. We have communal tables as well as small group tables and it is lovely to see the diverse group of people that gather to eat and share conversation, including those from our memory café. Belonging to a community is an important part of good mental health and happiness and as many of our clients live alone, the Alice Cross Centre is a central part of their daily life.
We are currently sending out 350 meals per month to the home and serving around 300 per month in the centre. We get up to 50 people per week visiting our community café.
We started the meal delivery service during Covid and this established the need to the extent that we decided to keep it running once we could open the Centre again. Many older people didn't want to or couldn't come back to the centre and we had attracted new referrals from the local health team for hospital discharge patients plus others who needed the service due to their circumstances. We have always fed people in the Centre and the cost of living crisis has increased the need for good food that is subsidised or free.
Therefore your donations enable us to provide nutritious food to people in need due to the cost of living crisis or their personal circumstances.