Coventry is set to pilot a community supermarket scheme in a bid to tackle food poverty and reduce the demand on the city's foodbanksFeeding Coventry has secured £250,000 of National Lottery funding to launch the scheme which will sell food at a discounted price to people in need.
Gavin Kibble, trustee of Feeding Coventry said the scheme would reduce the demand on foodbanks in the city by supporting people through the issues that lead to their use.
Coventry is one of three cities piloting the community supermarket idea after being approached by the national food poverty charity Feeding Britain.
A bid has been launched to use Foleshill Community Centre, which shut its doors in March 2015, as a base for the operations, but the team are waiting to hear whether it has been successful.
The scheme would work on a membership basis, assessed by need, whereby those signed up would be able to buy food at approximately a third of the price they would in a normal supermarket.
As well as offering discounted food, a dedicated team would support members through times of hardship and work within the community to resolve the issues surrounding food poverty.
Gavin explained: "Foodbanks deal with the consequences of food poverty rather than the causes.
"There's always something that goes wrong in someone's life that results in them needing the foodbank - low income, perhaps their benefits are delayed or they have been sanctioned for not turning up the job centre on time.
"The basic premise behind a community supermarket is to offer either free or deeply discounted food. It's different to a foodbank because they deal with emergency provision.
"This is the next step up - it's about dependence support and building wrap-around interventions.
"For example if someone came to the supermarket at a difficult time, the team there would provide mentoring, they may help with a business idea, or they would work with you to solve a dept issue.
"It enables you to take it to the next level which is dealing with health and wellbeing - setting up cooking courses, sports programmes for example.
"It turns it from something you provide at the community to working with the community in order to support the community and try and take them out of the causes of poverty."
Feeding Coventry is working with both of the city's universities as well as a number of other organisations on the project.