Harvest Festival

14 October 2016

This year we celebrated Harvest Festival in Chapel and collected non-perishable items for the Buckingham Food Bank of which Stowe Church is a huge supporter. An appeal went out before Exeat and the response was phenomenal – the donations spilled over from the quiet room at the back of Chapel. One House held a cake sale and after finding out what the Food Bank was short of, spent all of the proceeds to fill the deficit.

When we see all this food, it is hard to imagine how there might be so many people who still don’t have enough to eat – after all we have three good meals a day at Stowe, there is fruit and toast available at all times in the Houses and, of course, we have the tuck shop in which we can buy sweets, biscuits and all manner of goodies.

But there is extreme poverty in much of the world today with 8 million people living below the minimum of $1.90 per person per day threshold for extreme poverty. And yet we know that there is enough food in the world to feed everyone. Isn’t that shocking? The Harvest Appeal was in part a response to that, but more specifically to help the poor in our area. Poverty affects one in four children in the UK today. When children grow up poor they miss out on the things most children take for granted: warm clothes, school trips, having friends over for tea. They do less well at school and earn less as adults. There were 3.9 million children living in poverty in the UK in 2014-15. That is 28% of children or nine out of a classroom of 30. 8.4 million people in the UK, the equivalent of the entire population of London, are struggling to afford to eat.

The Trussell Trust, the charity which runs a network of 425 Food Banks across the UK, says that numbers needing emergency food remain at worryingly high levels. The food that has been donated by Stowe will go to the Buckingham Food Bank which helped 60 families last year – in an area which is considered one of the wealthiest in the country. The Food Bank was almost empty before the collection of food arrived from Stowe – it is now full. A huge thank you to everyone who donated. You really have made a difference.

Revd Sue Sampson, Stowe Minister