Rising energy and maintenance bills, combined with the end of a critical grant, have led a Sheffield community kitchen to close its doors in the city centre this week.
Foodhall, a community-run kitchen and open dining room, is holding a closing party this weekend.
The organisation has run since 2015, using food waste from local traders to serve hot meals to the community.
Loyal to the open-door ethos of Foodhall, anybody is welcome to attend the weekend’s events. They have always operated on a contribute what you can basis, where nobody is turned away for lack of funds.
The closure of its building on 62 Brown Street comes after a large grant ended that Foodhall staff were reliant on to pay salaries. On top of hikes to energy bills and the building requiring various fixes, the building became “impossible to keep up with,” Foodhall said in its closure notice.
Speaking to Sheffield Wire, Charlie Garrett, 26, said: “It’s a closing party in the sense that we’re moving out of the building.”
The aim, he says, is to find a space and an organisation which shares Foodhall’s values.
“Foodhall means community and hope,” he added.
Tonight from 7-11pm there will be karaoke and tomorrow between 12-3pm there will be one last shared meal, followed by a memory archiving session and one last Foodhall boogie.
Featuring DJs from Thirdspace, Love and Lust and Side5tep, it is a chance to “give your feet a treat on the dance floor and say goodbye to our retiring space the way we said hello to it, with banging tunes and friendly faces.”
Fabian Horrocks, 24, volunteered for Foodhall during the pandemic, where it was responsible for delivering 15,000 meals to people in need across the city.
He said: “Foodhall brought together a community of people with a desire to make Sheffield a more equal city. The community was about more than helping others, it left a footprint for future egalitarian endeavours in the city.”
Any donations over the weekend will go into a pot towards finding a new space or distributed back to the community it serves in some way.
