A new report released this week estimates 45,000 households using Anglicare Emergency Relief services don’t have enough money to adequately feed their families.

The report When there’s not enough to eat, timed to coincide with Anti-Poverty Week this week, looked specifically at the “food insecurity” of individuals and families already accessing Anglicare emergency relief services, which can include anything from financial assistance for overdue bills, to assistance for families facing crises such as illness, violence or homelessness.

Anglicare Australia’s executive director Kasy Chambers says the organisation was shocked by statistics indicating adults in one third of Anglicare-serviced households go without food for at least one day a week.

“Our research clearly indicates that parents try to protect their children by deliberately missing meals themselves and sometimes going without food for a whole day,” said Chambers. The report also suggests that despite this sacrifice, 1 in 10 children in also regularly go without food.

In the report, Jeremy Halcrow from Anglicare points to informal networks, including community- and church-run food kitchens which he says “play … a significant role in reducing the impact of food insecurity.” But he warns such services cannot be expected to “fill the gap” where government intervention fails.

“Many highly vulnerable people, such as those in food crisis, are dependent on support systems provided or funded by the state,” Halcrow writes. “The withdrawal of such funding effectively means the general public through local schools and churches is being expected to support people in very difficult circumstances well beyond these services’ capacity.”

Churches around Australia have been running soup kitchens as a way to reach out to communities in need. In Western Australia, St Albans Anglican Church has been running a soup kitchen on Saturday nights for over 20 years, averaging 30-50 people. Organiser Dean Powell says it’s a ministry for “people who are struggling”, suggesting people in the community come as needed, and there’s a high turnover right week to week.

In Coffs Harbour in northern NSW, the Uniting Church Soup Kitchen celebrated its 21^st birthday last year. 15-year soup kitchen veteran Joan Howlett, also the pastoral care worker at the church, told a local newspaper last year that the soup kitchen started “purely out of need”, and now offers free meals five days a week.

In Sydney’s inner west, The Exodus Foundation run by the Uniting Church Ashfield Parish Mission provides 1,000 meals every day to Sydney’s poor and homeless through its Loaves & Fishes Restaurant, and now also via the Exodus Mobile Food Van. Exodus Foundation CEO Rev. Bill Crews says the organisation has served over 2.5 million diners in the past 23 years.

The Exodus Foundation echoes the concerns of the Anglicare report.

“We see overwhelming need everyday. We often come across families who are skipping meals just to get by.”

Rev Crew says organisations like his serve as a stopgap, picking up the people who’ve fallen through the cracks of government care. “And that’s really meant our organisation falls between the cracks [for government support] too.”

He says the Exodus Foundation, and others with a similar mandate, are stretched in their capacity to cope with increasing numbers of people in the community who aren’t getting enough to eat.

“The gap has been widening in the forty years I’ve been involved with people in trouble,” says Crew.

If you’re in Sydney today, The Exodus Foundation’s Mobile Food Van will be serving meals to city workers at Wynyard Park from 11.45 to 1.30pm, to give workers a taste of what it’s like to be homeless or food insecure.

To read the full Anglicare report, click here.

Featured image: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/939017