Starting at the finishing line

“I never imagined that I would be able to run 10 kilometres, especially as I’d just given up smoking,” Sara Kurdi remembers. She’d entered the Simplyhealth Great Manchester Run to raise funds for Manchester Central Foodbank, one of the only student-led food banks in the country. But for Sara, the finishing line was just the beginning.

Sara, BSocSc Social Anthropology, decided to attend a volunteering session to see how financial donations would help the food bank’s work. She found a warm, welcoming environment for some of the city’s most vulnerable people.

“I have personal experience of some of the issues the food bank’s clients face and I wanted to understand better the role that food banks are playing to address some of these,” she explains.

Sara’s interest in the world of food banks was also growing thanks to the anthropological theory unit on her degree course. “As students, we’re so focused on our education and it’s very easy to lose sight of what’s going on around us,” she reflects. “This is a part of my life that is totally given to something else. And meeting and talking to such a variety of people has improved my interpersonal skills and confidence.”

Sara started by organising donations into boxes but her role has expanded to include one-to-one meetings with clients to identify and record reasons for food-bank use. “Working on administration has opened my eyes to the societal problems people are, sadly, increasingly facing. It’s completely taken me out of my comfort zone.”

While Sara is embarking on a year abroad at VU University Amsterdam, she’s also thinking ahead to her final year – and the food bank has approached her about becoming a trustee on her return. “At the food bank, we like to think there will be a point where our help is not needed, but in reality, there’s a range of economic and social reasons why people need to use them and the problems we see do not always have easy solutions,” she explains.

“Becoming a trustee is an exciting, slightly daunting challenge, but the skills and experience I’ll gain will be invaluable when I graduate.

“We could potentially be making decisions about how the food bank is run. That ultimately has an impact on people’s lives, their communities and society.”