The remarkable story of Trevor Blaney and his DIY mission to feed the homeless on the Isle of Wight gets the OFM award for Local Food Hero
Trevor Blaney sees a different Isle of Wight to the one enjoyed by day trippers and tourists. Driving with him in his 4x4 on one of the last days of summer you start to see his version too. “There’s a lad living in the hedge over there, who we help out,” he will say. Or he will point out derelict holiday chalets or boarded-up hotels in which people have made their homes. Blaney is a native of south Yorkshire but he has lived here for 30 years. He first started to see the island in a new way when he volunteered at a council-backed homeless shelter. “It was OK,” he recalls, “but it was clear that the real problems lay with people who were excluded from the night shelter because of their addictions or mental health. Being a rural place these people take to the woods and the fields rather than shop doorways. They are less visible. I decided to go out and find these people and try to look after them.”
At the end of 2014, Blaney borrowed a catering trailer from a friend and started a Facebook page, with some of the images of people he had found sleeping rough in November – two young men living in a three-sided corrugated-iron shelter, others in makeshift tents in the woods or on the beach. The page had a slow start but it gained momentum. “To begin with only my friends saw it,” Blaney says. “Oddly, people who I had been to school with and hardly seen since, first donated a fiver here and a tenner there.”
The first winter I fed dozens of people. That's now risen to hundreds. One week, I did meals for 225 people
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