Creative Nowhere Land Blog - Every little helps!
For a couple of years now I’ve been volunteering for, Birmingham based charity, Let’s Feed Brum. Every Monday night I grab my volunteer lanyard and head out to Old Square in the city centre to help the rest of the ‘Monday Night Crew’ (Official Shout Out!) give out hot meals, supplies and, sometimes, more importantly, to be a friendly face and someone to talk to. It’s not something I shout a lot about for fear of being ‘that guy’, but it feels good to help even if it’s a just little. Also, since meeting and becoming friends with Bob, who you might have read about in a previous post ( https://www.mattwilsonphoto.co.uk/cnl-blog/2019/6/19/creative-nowhere-land-blog-this-is-bob ), I felt like I needed to do something more to help.
Birmingham is a great city and I love this city, but like many other cities across the country, our homelessness problem is terrible. We have the second-largest homelessness problem after London with 1,152 registered cases. That’s just ‘registered cases’ and I’m certain there are a lot more cases left unregistered. Sometimes statistics don’t tell the real story of what’s going on out there and in my opinion, it’s worse than that in Birmingham.
Let’s Feed Brum do an incredible job and give out food and supplies to anyone who might need it every night of the week except a Sunday. With 10 million tonnes of food being thrown away every year in the UK, Let’s feed Brum have teamed up with some of Birmingham’s cafés, bars and restaurants to help feed as many people as they can. Added to that, they’re increasing the number of volunteers out on the streets and getting the community together to be ‘the humans we should all be’. As the charity grows I’ve got no doubt that more events will follow and hopefully we can help as many people who might need it in Birmingham as we can.
Anyway, this all brings me to the topic of this weeks blog post. Let’s Feed Brum have asked me to shoot the portraits of the charity trustees. So last week Gary (my awesome assistant for the day) and I headed out to Cathedral Square in the centre of Birmingham with the kit to shoot the first trustee portraits of the amazing Alan and Katherine Strang. Alan and Katherine were at Birmingham Cathedral giving out hot drinks in the new LFB trailer and also clothes inside the stunning cathedral.
I can’t actually share any of the portraits yet as they’re part of a much bigger project but Alan and Katherine were great subjects and I’m looking forward to shooting the rest of the trustees. Once we’d got the portraits in the bag though, I captured some images of some of our awesome volunteers and team from Let’s Feed Brum doing their thing that I thought I’d share.
The team at Let’s Feed Brum and all of the volunteers do an incredible job and I’m very lucky to be a part of it all in some small way. Keep a lookout for the finished portraits of the trustees, I’m shooting the rest of them in a couple of weeks time.
If you would like to know more about Let’s Feed Brum then visit the website, give them a follow on social media and get in touch if you would like to volunteer or help in any way you can. Every little helps! (yep, I said the name of the blog post)