Tara Moala, 43, is the general manager of food security at Auckland City Mission – Te Tāpui Atawhai. She says up to 600 people are expected to attend the inner-city site for some Christmas Day feasting.
Kiwi families doing it tough this Christmas – Watch this story on TVNZ+.
In the meantime the City Mission was busy packing food parcels for families in need. 1News took a peek at the Wesley Community Centre as whānau picked up kai and selected presents for their little ones ahead of the big day.
On Christmas Day, we are expecting up to 600 people coming through to Haeata, at our inner city site, and we are expecting to be able to give them really amazing, beautiful food from early morning all the way through.
We have over 500 whānau coming through this site over the four days that we're running it, and what they're getting is pantry staples.
They get some vegetables, potatoes, onions and carrots and cabbages as well. They're getting some fruit, such as strawberries, pineapples, apples, and when we can, we'll also give bananas out.
Our biggest thing that we actually provide is bread, so we give four loaves of bread to our whānau. Every single whānau gets that, so they can just pop it into their freezer and have it over the next few days.
We give out 30,000 presents for our whānau, and that's for each of the different tamariki, because we believe that all tamariki should be able to open up a present on Christmas Day.
Those ones are actually all donated. We can't put any kind of funding towards that, because all of our funding goes towards our food.
Our budget this year is $200,000 and that needs to be topped up with other fundraising and donations that we receive from our amazing Aucklanders that come through... We have multiple different organisations and businesses that donate. We have food businesses that help us out, and then we also do need to top up as well.
It’s $138 per food parcel, and that's how much we need to be able to fundraise.
Haeata (the community dining room) is an amazing service, and we have some beautiful chefs there that can really make something out of nothing. So the general cost that we have is $64 for four plates, which is one table.
We always get lots of canned goods, which is actually amazing. We have lots of baked beans come through, lots of those little cans of things that people can donate are actually really important, because it gives us the staples for those pantries.
That actually works for us at food security for our food parcels, as well as Haeata, because they always do a breakfast every single morning, 365 days a year. So yeah, baked beans are great.
The need is high, the need hasn't dropped at all. The cost of living has continued to rise, and that has flowed on to our whānau.
So the increase of their rent, the increase of their power, their water bills, all those different things add up. When they get to us, they’re already financially exhausted and we just want to give them a bit of cheer.
I just would love to give a shout out to every single person that helps us by donating, but also those businesses that make a commitment to give large amounts of food to us, and presents.
They have done such an amazing job for us to be able to commit to that and I just want to thank them. We wouldn't be able to do it without them.
Kiwi families doing it tough this Christmas – Watch this story on TVNZ+.
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