Hackathon

Children of Adam is a weekly outdoor soup kitchen which has served London’s homeless community since 2011 and currently provides for 110 guests every week offering them hot and cold food along with other essentials; toiletries, clothing and a warm welcome and volunteers who care.

COA has not missed a distribution since its inception in spite of the struggles we have faced throughout the years, from funding, to the pandemic, weather conditions or a drop in volunteer numbers.

Main challenges we face:

• Over the years we have worked to encourage in kind donations to reduce our costs.
  However we currently face the prospect of having our donation of compostable
  spoons, bags (both paper and plastic alternatives), cups and food containers with
  lids, being cut. This will significantly increase our operational costs and may
  ultimately lead to us having to return to using plastics in an effort to keep costs low.
  
• We currently face 2 major logic issues: a shortage of storage space and cars to
  deliver the donations. Volunteers are currently storing much of the items we rely on
  for our distributions – tables, cleaning products etc – in their cars between
  distributions. This is not sustainable. But storage units are expensive and we cannot
  afford them. We could also benefit from larger donations which could last us several
  months if we had storage facilities to store them. In addition to this, only a couple of
  our core volunteers have access to cars which makes logistics very difficult and
  means they rarely miss a session. We are in urgent need of cars to help get the
  donations to the site.
  
• As a 100% donation charity we have no funds for admin and our logo and website are dated and need a facelift.
  
• Our distribution is based in Holborn, we would love to onboard local cafes and help
  them redistributed any unsold food items on Sundays. Larger shops/bakeries have
  signed up to organisations including FareShare and Neighbourly to distribute their
  goods, but independent sellers haven’t and often discard food that we could benefit
  from, they have not responded to our in person/online efforts to contact them to
  convince them that we are a good partner to reduce their food waste.
  
• We distribute more than just food, we help guests with sleeping bags, tents, toiletries
  and other essentials and need donations to support these, but companies and
  organisations aren’t so forthcoming with such donations. How can we tap into their
  supplies?
  
• We set up opposite the LSE building and are only a short walk from other universities
  including UAL, SOAS etc however none of their student groups volunteer with us in
  spite of our efforts to reach out. We would love to have them on board.
  
• We work with a number of students groups and encourage people to bring their
  friends, but volunteer numbers aren’t guaranteed and many people will sign up to
  attend and not show up or cancel on the day. We struggle most with volunteer
  numbers during school holidays (August-September, Christmas, Eid and Easter
  Break). We expect this is because many students may be travelling home for the
  holidays or taking a break from the city themselves. But this leaves us unmanned
  and juggling to run the distribution with few hands on deck.