2021-12-31-accounts

Annual Report: January-December 2021

We began 2021 with Management meetings still on Zoom. By the end we had face-to-face meetings, which some found advantageous but made it more difficult for colleagues from Hassocks and Hurstpierpoint to attend.

The food bank was distributing food from 85 Church Walk, and the United Reform Church or Powell House (next door), Hassocks, with deliveries also being made from each as well as in Hurstpierpoint. As Covid began to increase Burgess Hill moved to delivery only for a few months but by the end of the year we had customers collecting as well, With the Burgess Hill Town Council Help Point across the street it was often simpler for customers to collect their voucher on Tuesday/Thursday morning and bring it directly across. Details of our work are summarised in tables below.

We began a trial of offering frozen food as well as the standard food box and this was well received and became part of our normal offering. Through the year we have provided books explaining how to make the best of long-life food.

We have revamped our web-site thanks to the efforts of one of our volunteers/distributors in Hurstpierpoint who has greatly improved its appearance and usefulness.

We have changed one of our bank accounts to the Monmouth Building Society as Nationwide stopped providing the service we needed.

The premises continue to be a great improvement with the exception of a section of rear roof that still leaks water onto an internal wall and prevents our using the room for anything useful.

In March we started to receive a monthly donation of £500 of food from one local company that continues to date. This is a great help as donated food has fallen off due doubtless to the smaller footfall in local shops. We have resorted to buying much more food than hitherto to make up the difference, but we have plenty of funds to support this.

We have continued to offer donated toiletries, cleaning and sanitary materials to customers who visit our premises. We sometimes purchase specific supplies e.g. baby food/nappies to satisfy particular requests.

We have worked with the new Burgess Hill Pantry both in cooperating with food supplies and also referring some regular customers to them with the aim of weaning them off dependence on our services. This has been a concern throughout the year as some seem to rely on their weekly food parcels; we discussed changing back to an emergency service at the end of the year but did not implement it due to the continual hardship felt by some.

At the end of the year we cooperated with the Annual Burgess Hill Christmas Hampers Appeal which this year distributed 300 Christmas Hampers in the area. We also distributed many extra Christmas packages provided by a generous donor.

We submitted a proposed change in Constitution to the Charity Commission to make it easier for us to use money donations. The process is ongoing.

Joe Wilkinson, Chair of Trustees, 29 April 2022

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ANALYSIS OF BURGESS HILL COMMUNITY FOOD BANK ACTIVITIES IN 2021

1. The nature and extent of BHCFB activities

Since the start of the pandemic BHCFB has been distributing food to clients through a combination of collections from its outlets and deliveries to the client’s home. Distributions are normally made against BHCFB vouchers issued by local organisations, such as the Town Council and West Sussex County Council Children's Services. The amount distributed to a client is based on the number of people in the client’s household as specified on the voucher, with pre-teens counting as half an adult or teenager. The standard unit of distribution is a box of sorted foodstuff sufficient to last two adults for three days.

The number of weekly distributions in 2021 are shown in the figure below. The red line is the weekly average of distributions in 2020. During 2021 BHCFB provided 337 clients with food through a total of 1,020 distributions. This represents an increase in activity over 2020 of some 15%.

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35 Weekly Distributions
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
Weekly redemptions
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In addition to its main outlet in Burgess Hill town centre, BHCFB distributes through two satellites in Hassocks and Hurstpierpoint. Distributions in Hurstpierpoint are made solely by delivery. Activity during 2020 at each of these three outlets is shown in Table 1.

TABLE 1. KEY DATA ON BHCFB DISTRIBUTIONS IN 2021

No. of distributo	ns Number ofpersons beneftng* Adults/Teens Pre-teens Total	Boxes Distributed
Burgess Hill 736 Hassocks 233 Hurstpierpoint 51	1,310 500 1,810 346 192 538 99 84 183	1,041 302 92
TOTAL 1,020	1,755 776 2,531	1,435

*Note that these numbers refer to each distribution to client households. Thus, if a household comprising 3 adults/teenagers received two distributions, it would have contributed six to the total of adults/teens of 1,310.

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2. The relative importance of collections and deliveries

Approximately two-thirds of all 2021 distributions were collected by the client, with one-third delivered to clients who were unable to collect.

TABLE 2. COLLECTIONS AND DELIVERIES ANALYSED BY OUTLET

Burgess Hill Hassocks Hurstpierpoint TOTAL	Collected Delivered Total	Collected Delivered Total
	(Distributons)	(% of Distributons)
	466 270 736 202 31 233 0 51 51 668 352 1020	63.3 36. 7 100 86.7 13. 3 100 - 100. 0 100 65.5 34. 5 100

3. Sources of Vouchers

As in 2020, Burgess Hill Town Council’s Help Point was by far the largest issuer of vouchers. The main issuers are shown in Table 3.

TABLE 3. MAIN VOUCHER-ISSUING ORGANISATIONS IN 2021

	Number of Vouchers
Burgess Hill Town Council Help Point Linwood Community Mental Health Centre West Sussex C.C. Children's Services Mid Sussex D.C. Housing Services Clarion Housing	437 76 59 32 20

4. Client household size and age composition

Beneficiary households were predominantly small. It will be seen from Table 4 that approximately 39% of all distributions went to single persons and over three quarters to households with three members or less.

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TABLE 4. DISTRIBUTIONS ANALYSED BY HOUSEHOLD SIZE

Household size (persons)	BHCFB Distributons
	Number Percent Cumulatve percent
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9	394 38.6 38.6 248 24.3 62.9 141 13.8 76.8 80 7.8 84.6 82 8.0 92.6 41 4.0 96.7 30 2.9 99.6 1 0.1 99.7 3 0.3 100.0
TOTAL	1,020 100 -

Table 5 shows the relative importance in 2021 of adults/teens and pre-teens at each of BHCFB’s three outlets. Some 69% of all beneficiaries were adults or teenagers.

TABLE 5. THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF AGE GROUPS AT EACH OUTLET

	Percent
	Adults/Teens Pre-teens Total
Burgess Hill Hassocks Hurstpierpoint	72.4 27.6 100.0 6 4.3 3 5.7 10 0.0 5 4.1 4 5.9 10 0.0
Total	69.3 30.7 100.0

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5. Multiple distributions to households

While the Covid emergency is causing problems, BHCFB has suspended restricting the number of donations given to any one client in a calendar year.

During 2021, half of all distributions were to clients making use of the food bank on 5 occasions or less, with just over half of all clients using it only once. A small number of clients used the food bank frequently, with one quarter of all distributions going to just 16 of the food bank’s 337 clients.

TABLE 6. ANALYSIS OF THE IMPORTANCE OF MULTIPLE DISTRIBTIONS TO CLIENTS

Distributons per client No. of clients	Total distributons Cumulatve number of clients Cumulatve number of distributons	Cumulatve percentage of clients Cumulatve number of distributons
1 177 2 64 3 34 4 15 5 9 6 5 7 10 8 2 9 3 10 2 11-15 7 16-20 1 21-30 5 31-40 2 51 1	177 177 177 128 241 305 102 275 407 60 290 467 45 299 512 30 304 542 70 314 612 16 316 628 27 319 655 20 321 675 92 328 767 16 329 783 116 334 899 70 336 969 51 337 1020	52.5 17.4 71.5 29.9 81.6 39.9 86.1 45.8 88.7 50.2 90.2 53.1 93.2 60.0 93.8 61.6 94.7 64.2 95.3 66.2 97.3 75.2 97.6 76.8 99.1 88.1 99.7 95.0 100.0 100.0
Total 337	1020 - -	- -

6. Frozen Food

During 2021, clients collecting from or obtaining deliveries from the Burgess Hill outlet were able to opt to have additional frozen food items. In the case of both collections and deliveries, over 70% of clients chose this option (Table 7).

TABLE 7. TAKE UP OF THE FROZEN FOOD OPTION ANALYSED BY COLLECTIONS AND DELIVERIES

	With Frozen	Without frozen	Total Number of Distributons
	Number of Distributons % of Total Distributons	Number of Distributons % of Total Distributon
Collected Delivered	193 71.5 334 71.7	77 28.5 132 28.3	270 466
Total	527 100.0	209 100.0	736

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INDEPENDENT AUDITORS REPORT 2021 BOARD OF TRUSTEES I have audited the 2021 accounts for Burgess Hill Community Food Bank (a charitable organisation) and in my opinion the financial records and statements are a true and fair reflection of the financial position of Burgess Hill st Community Food Bank for the period January I" to December 31 , 2021. Jonathan Bird FMAAT 12 March 2022