October 2016 KCA Update

Phil Davies from Kiwi Community Assistance (KCA)

Its been a while since we last updated our neighbours as to what KCA has been up to.

Back on 17th July, Tracy one of the co-founders of KCA was featured on TV1 News Good Sorts.

Here's the link if you would like to know more about the valuable work that we do in the back ground.

www.tvnz.co.nz...

We have recently signed contracts with Countdown Porirua and Johnsonville stores to commence rescuing food from them. KCA has been food rescuing from Countdown Tawa over the past 18 months. From the 5th January 2016 to a few days ago we had rescued over 17 tons of food still fit to be eaten but not sold from Countdown Tawa.

We are now into our third year of sponsorship with rescuing food from Foodstuffs North Island. Back in July we received a significant donation of 12 pallets totaling just under 10 tons of tinned tomatoes which we distributed as far as Upper Hutt to Miramar, back through Wellington City and up to Porirua.

KCA also rescues food from Rosa Foods, Johnsonville School Markets, Bidvest, Whittaker's to name a few companies.

We would like to thank local businesses such as Dobbins Office Furniture, Kris Faafoi's electoral office, PGG Wrightson in Porirua who are drop off points for our donors to leave items in our donation bin. Thanks to all our donors who use these drop off points to give to us generously.

Last month KCA and The Salvation Army Porirua signed a Memorandum of Understanding. This allows us to distribute fresh and frozen food stocks to 3 out of the 4 foodbanks in the Porirua region.

We continue to support local schools such as Tawa Intermediate School, Linden School, HHT School, Holy Family School, Natone Park School, Hutt Valley Activity Centre, Porirua Activity Centre and 2-3 schools through Arise Church by providing food for their students to eat on the school grounds.

Thanks to the 1 off donation of 1.4 tons of permissions donated to us by Community Fruit Hamilton and to Linfox for delivering it to us free of charge to our depot in Grenada North.

Thanks to the local Tawa businesses - Tawa Storage Solutions and Tawa Community Centre for allowing us to have donation bins/area on their premises for you to leave your donations for us to collect.

We would like to thank businesses such as Allied Work Force up in Auckland for their donation of brand new high vis wet weather gear which we distributed to residents who were homeless.

Thanks to Tasman Bay Manufacturing in Nelson who donated us 330kgs of butter chicken sauce and shipped it up to Wellington for us free of charge.

Thanks to Grace Removals for donating us $1,000 to purchase new scales so that we can weigh all the donated stock to write reports to the many companies who contribute to us.

Thanks to Arrows Uniforms for starting to donate all of their surplus end of lines brand new clothing to us so that we can pass them on to others for free.

There are lots of other people that I could list to thank but then I'd be writing a novel SO THANK YOU to everyone - donors, financial contributors, corporate volunteer teams from Chep, Chorus, ACC, Kiwibank, Westpac, BNZ who have sent multiple teams to assist us. Thanks to our dedicated team of volunteers (74 in total) who work a combined total hours of 140hours a week to ensure that we can assist as many people as possible.