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JOSEPHINE FRANKS / Things
Helen Robinson of Auckland City Mission says mission staff are distraught at the number of people they have been unable to help.
The Auckland City Mission says it is concerned about the unmet need of the city’s most vulnerable after one of its Christmas food package distribution centers logged 42,000 calls in one day.
Papakura Marae is one of five centers working on a mission to feed Auckland residents this Christmas.
In previous years, the whānau queued overnight to be the first to receive a package of food and gifts.
“There is no dignity in that,” said marae CEO Tony Kake.
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That has been replaced by a phone system, where people call to be screened and are given a time to pick up their package.
It was a huge improvement for people who slept in their cars hoping to get some food, Helen Robinson said of the mission.
“But we are equally distressed for those whose need we have failed to meet.”
There were thousands and thousands of requests for help that they had not been able to respond, he said.
On Wednesday afternoon, the mission said its Christmas phone lines were down “due to extremely high and unprecedented demand.”
In a post on its Facebook page, the mission said it was not accepting new applications while staff worked on existing applications and called people.
Demand for the mission’s standard food packages is double what it was in February. During the shutdown, staff reported weeks in which they tripled what they used to manage.
JOSEPHINE FRANKS / Things
Papakura Marae has been transformed into a distribution center, working together with the mission.
But they have not been able to increase the number of Christmas packages they are giving this year. The mission had already been working at full capacity this year, Robinson said, and the infrastructure simply wasn’t there to do more.
At the five sites, 8,500 packages will be delivered this Christmas.
But Kake said that if funding and support were available, they could easily deliver double or triple the packages they were delivering this year.
JOSEPHINE FRANKS / Things
Families will receive a standard food pack, plus gifts like these teddy bears and ingredients for a holiday meal.
Inside the marae, toys and gifts are arranged in rows along the trestle tables, labeled by age and gender so that they can be delivered to the appropriate family.
Each family with children under 16 will receive a gift for each of them, as well as a box with enough food for three or four days.
The other end of the aisle is filled with sacks of onions, huge bags of carrots, boxes of bananas, and boxes of bell peppers.
The running volunteers pack fresh vegetables, meat, dairy, and dry staples like pasta and rice into cardboard boxes.
With the mission’s Christmas lunch canceled this year due to Covid-19 concerns, the food packages have been beefed up with the ingredients for a festive meal: chicken, kumara, sauce and dessert.
There will still be five smaller lunches across the city, but they will serve about 600 people instead of the 1600 who were fed last year.
