A Restorative Justice Charity in Southwark has been supporting its local community by providing food to up to 300 school children and their families thanks to help from their local Tesco store, FareShare and the community.
Throughout the pandemic, the Restorative Justice for All International Institute (RJ4All) has supplied food parcels donated by Tesco’s Surrey Quays Store to school children and families from South East London.
Set up in 2011 by Founder and Director, Professor Theo Gavrielides, the Restorative Justice for All (RJ4All) International Institute is a charity with a mission to address poverty and advance community cohesion and human rights.
Previously a human rights advisor at the Ministry of Justice, Theo is an academic with a PhD in Restorative Justice who set up the charity to combat inequality in the local area where he lives with his son.
RJ4All is now the manager of the RJ4All Rotherhithe Community Centre which offers a range of social justice and poverty relief projects, educational programmes, intercultural dialogue, internships and volunteering opportunities to marginalised groups. RJ4All provides a range of services such as a foodbank, a community fridge, free sport classes, a community library, COVID19 tests and educational workshops, along with a safe space for anyone who wants to pop in for a coffee and a chat with the team.
As part of the foodbank, RJ4All receives food parcels containing a variety of food products provided through Tesco’s Community Food Connection scheme, which is run in partnership with food redistribution charity FareShare.
Theo said: “The last 19 months have been incredibly difficult for everyone, and that is especially true for some of the most marginalised people in society.
“We’ve been actively supporting the community now for 10 years, so when the pandemic struck we knew we had to offer our support in whatever way we could.
“I’d like to thank everyone at RJ4All for all of their hard work and to Tesco for allowing us to consistently provide food to people in the area.
“It’s something a lot of us take for granted but having regular food donations really does make a difference”.
Tesco Community Food Connection links stores to local charities and community groups to ensure that no good food goes to waste.
Claire De Silva, Head of Communities at Tesco, said: “We know that the Community Food Connection scheme is making a real difference to groups like RJ4All by providing a little bit of extra help in the shape of surplus food from our stores.
“This is the biggest supermarket food redistribution scheme in the UK, and we know there are more groups that could receive food for the work they carry out, so I would encourage any group that thinks it could benefit to contact FareShare, so we can help even more good causes.”
Lindsay Boswell, Chief Executive at FareShare, said: “We are incredibly thankful to Tesco for its continued support of FareShare. We work with a number of charities and community groups providing essential support to their local communities, and receiving a steady stream of food helps them to feed those who need it most.”
