Happy New Year!
Wishing all of our amazing supporters, volunteers and friends a Happy 2025! Today we are back open after a well earned break for team REfUSE. 2024 felt like a challenging one: our volunteer and staff community have supported each other through bereavements, illness and mental health struggles, staff team changes, and big changes to our surplus food supply. We said goodbye to some brilliant members of our team and got by without a general manager for well over half the year: meaning we all had to take on more responsibilities and work together. Despite all this, the REfUSE team of volunteers has continued to grow, new staff have brought new skills and passions, projects have been trialled, and we have risen to the challenge going above and beyond for our community.
Here are some of our stats from the year to show our impact for people and planet. In 2024 we served nearly 6000 more meals than we did in 2023!!
Read on for some stories to show how we’ve worked towards our 5-year strategy we launched back in April.
Seeing the problem and possibilities
Individuals will engage with the REfUSE community and feel inspired through the experience of eating healthy and sustainable food together.
It is still our mission to save good food from being wasted, and while we continue to do this, our restaurant nights specifically now reflect this change in focus. In response to feedback gathered from customers this year we are now occasionally purchasing meat and fish in line with our sustainability policy and showcasing local produce and growers with a focus on organic where possible. So far this year we have partnered with Broom House Farm and Gibside Community Farm and we are grateful that our Restaurant Nights remain incredibly popular. We are excited for what is coming up in 2025, you can book onto our January events here.
The change in food supply has also been reflected in various changes to our Waste Not Boxes throughout the year – thank you for persevering with us through this. Our latest announcement is that we will be trialling selling boxes online (uploaded on Tuesdays) for collection in Durham on Thursday from the New Year.
Pictured: The long awaited makeover of our trusty electric van. Sausages from Broomhouse farm that Jonny swapped for ingredients we wouldn’t use in the cafe.
Being Empowered to Act
Individuals will be supported to take steps to make change in their own lives
This year we have been working with our volunteers in more creative ways to use up expected (and unexpected) gluts of food. We have had jam and chutney making sessions where our amazing volunteers have shared skills with each other and learned to make their own preserves at home. If you missed out buying some of these creations at our Christmas fair then rest assured that our chutneys, jams and Jo’s Chilli sauces are for sale in the cafe throughout the year. In October our volunteers gathered, processed and hand pressed over 100 kgs of apples into apple juice. We have also purchased and used a dehydrator, made sauerkraut, kimchi and kombucha and much more. We are also sharing some of these skills via our Introduction to Fermentation workshop which launched in 2024, details for the next course can be found here.
2024 has also seen us introduce new Volunteer Nights. These monthly evening gatherings are a chance for new volunteers to come for an orientation session whilst current volunteers come and enjoy a talk or activity themed around our ethos as a cafe. New and existing volunteers have then had the chance to sit down and mix together whilst sharing a meal. Topics we have covered include an ethical clothing conversation and clothes swap, zero waste shopping, making preserves and pickles, seed saving, tasting and understanding the locally roasted coffee we serve in the cafe made by Durham coffee to name a few. If you’d like to come along as to one of these evenings a new or existing volunteer please contact Susie who can let you know more details.
Left: Volunteer Evening learning how to make beauty products from ingredients that would otherwise be overlooked.
Right: Volunteers processing 100kgs of apples into freshly pressed juice.
Speaking for change
Individuals will have the confidence and capacity to actively speak and effect change in thier wider contexts
This year we have participated in over 27 external events; local presentations to groups, youth group workshops and even a massive national festival. From chatting about systemic change, giving out leaflets about food waste, to cooking for thousands. In August we were at BOP Festival where we took the REfUSE Smoothie bike. We served up lots of fantastic smoothies made from fruit that we had rescued and frozen in previous weeks. Our volunteers enjoyed wearing our new fruit costumes to attract attention and chat to those attending. Our thirsty customers managed to pedal their way the equivalent distance from Crook to Durham (13km).
In 2023-24 our School project Eat Smart saw another 6 schools engaging and sharing about food waste and prevention. In addition year the pupils involved with Eat Smart have produced a video on how to use a knife and fork, talked with Chartwells (a large catering company responsible for many local schools catering) and also advocated and talked with other schools. Eat Smart Waste Warriors at Cestria Primary won Schools and Colleges category at the Durham County Council Environmental Awards, pus we also came away with the overall outstanding Award!
Left: Bop Festival – customers cycles our smoothie bike using rescued fruit to make their own smoothies.
Right: Children from local primary school testing eggs for freshness during visit to the cafe.
Can you help?
REfUSE is a small, growing organisation which does a lot with a little. We rely on generosity: whether volunteers in our cafe and warehouse, cafe customers giving pay-as-you-feel contributions, committed staff working overtime, kitchen leads giving their time to train up new volunteers, local people giving vegetables from their allotments, or organisations partnering with us to support people who are struggling. Even so, it costs a lot to keep an organisation going.
If you support our work, we would be enormously grateful for any financial donations you can give. Even just donating £5, the cost of a coffee and a mince pie, would help us in 2025 to look after our team well and continue towards of vision of ensuring people, places, and things are valued, never overlooked or wasted.
You can donate directly via PayPal, or sign up to join our supporters newsletter and donate regularly via our website: https://refusedurham.org.uk/donate/
Thanks for reading our 2024 report. Once again, we wish you a HAPPY NEW YEAR from all the team at REfUSE!