Market Support Assistant

To help set up and run Hungerford Food Community's monthly Food & Artisan Markets, Working with a small team of volunteers, setting up tables, chairs, gazebos, meeting-and-greeting, asking for donations. Also you can help update and put up monthly market advertising signs around Hungerford 10 days before each market.

You will meet like-minded people and gain a sense of satisfaction in supporting a popular and well-attended event.

About Hungerford Food Community

We are a community organisation that believes that the choices we make about the food we buy, cook and eat can have a huge effect on our health (mental and physical), our environment and our local economy. We also believe that cooking is an important life skill that has dwindled in recent generations resulting in a reliance on take-away meals and fast food that tends to be low in nutrition and often high in calories and cost.

- We run cooking sessions in primary schools, youth clubs, mental health charity, foodbank etc to increase confidence in cooking nutritious meals from scratch
- We help minimise food waste by promoting recipes using leftovers, dried bread etc, campaigns to use Halloween pumpkins and not over buy at Christmas
- We help caterers reduce food waste via apps like Olio
- We help reduce waste of locally grown produce eg we pick surplus produce from Shalbourne Community Growers and distribute to Foodbank and Olio, we help harvest apples from Town & Manor orchard for juicing, we collect surplus pumpkins from farmers and distribute to Loose Ends soup kitchen.
- We promote the use of low energy cooking appliances like air fryers and slow cookers to help reduce people's energy bills and carbon footprint.
- We promote vegetarian recipes to give people confidence to reduce their meat consumption.
- We run monthly markets (April to October) which support local producers, demonstrate seasonal and nutritious recipes, demonstrate best practice for separating event food waste for composting and using reusable cups and containers, collect foil for recycling, kitchen equipment swap to reduce waste, plant/seed swap to encourage people to grow their own, raise awareness of food charities like Compassion in World Farming.
- We fund cooking appliances and equipment for schools and food banks to pass onto clients
- We run Cook-Ins where the general public cook and eat a meal together from ingredients that would otherwise be wasted by the supermarket system.

What skills do I need?

Muscle power and ability to talk to the public are a plus but not required for all tasks. Team spirit. Good sense of humour.

When is this role available?

	Morning	Afternoon	Evening
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

Details

Time Commitment: Half a day/ monthly (Apr to Oct) and/or 8am - 2pm second Sunday of the month (Apr - Oct)

Where does this role take place?