* * Thank you so much to everyone who has supported our Emergency Fundraiser so far by donating and sharing! We have been overwhelmed with the support and after reaching our original target of £5,000 way earlier than anticipated, we have decided to stretch to a new target of £7,000 for the final two weeks of the fundraiser. Reaching this new target would allow us to cover a full months’ worth of (reduced) winter running costs. Your support is invaluable to the collective during a time where accessing grant-based funding is becoming more and more difficult. * *

Calais Food Collective

We are a grassroots organisation, working in solidarity with people on the move at the UK-France border in Calais, northern France. We support people on the move by providing food and water and promoting autonomy for communities facing extreme precariousness and continuous human rights violations by French and British governments.

Our current situation

As a political collective, we’ve fought for the basic rights of people on the move since 2020. But with the global need for humanitarian assistance rising, funding for projects supporting people on the move is harder to secure than ever. Despite our best efforts, we’re running out of funds to sustain our work through 2025. Without our projects, thousands of people on the move in Calais could face worsening food and water insecurity — basic necessities that should never be denied. We need to raise £5,000 by the end of the year to continue supporting displaced communities with water and food.

Our work

In Calais, thousands of displaced people hoping to cross the Channel to the UK find themselves trapped at the UK-France border. They experience undignified, precarious living conditions and ongoing harassment and oppression by the French authorities. The UK continues to provide funding to the French state for the policing and militarisation of the border. The French government’s “zero point of fixation” policy has created an extremely hostile environment for people on the move in northern France, seeking to deter them from crossing the border.

This policy involves the deliberate withholding of adequate access to basic needs, such as water and sanitation. The state-mandated provision of drinking water to people on the move in Calais is woefully inadequate. This purposeful limitation of access by the French state constitutes a violation of the right to water and continues despite France accepting United Nations Universal Periodic Review (UPR) recommendations on improving access to water and sanitation for people on the move in 2023.

The CFC water project was started in response to these failings of the French authorities and to address displaced communities’ urgent need for access to clean water. We have installed a number of water points in close proximity to the main living sites in Calais, each of which is refilled and cleaned daily and undergoes regular maintenance and sanitation. Our approach to facilitating water access responds directly to seasonal fluxes in populations and shifting locations of living sites, as well as periods of increased demand, such as throughout Ramadan. We aim to be as flexible as possible, installing new water points to serve new living sites as they form and ensuring that all communities have sufficient access to water. As a result, the water project has expanded significantly over the past two years, growing from six water points at the beginning of 2023 to ten this year. For many people on the move, our water points are the only way they can access clean drinking water and fulfil their basic sanitation needs, such as personal hygiene, washing clothes, and cleaning cooking utensils.

State-mandated provision of food is also inadequate, limited to breakfast and lunch and only at certain locations. For the more isolated communities, this can sometimes mean more than an hour’s walk in order to access a hot meal. By contrast, the CFC food project works to improve access to food by delivering cooking ingredients and utensils directly to the living sites, enabling people to cook for themselves on their own schedules and according to their preferences. We try to adapt our stock and provision according to feedback we receive from the community. Our approach to food distribution seeks to promote autonomy and choice and recognises the value that cooking and eating together can bring to a community.

Your support

Over the past years, a concerning downturn in funding for projects working with people on the move in northern France has meant that we have lost a number of vital funding partnerships. This has forced us to implement measures to cut our operational costs and reduce our spending on projects. Despite the efforts of our fundraising team to raise money through a variety of funding streams, we are still struggling to access the funds necessary to keep our current projects running at capacity.

This year has seen a major scaling down of the food project and we are no longer able to distribute to communities at many of the larger living sites. Instead, we have been forced to focus on isolated groups with the least access to food. This has also impacted our ability to cater to feedback from the community about their preferred ingredients for cooking. We are now unable to afford the highly requested items needed to cook an enjoyable and nutritionally balanced meal, such as fish, eggs and spices.

Despite reducing our distributions and cutting out higher cost ingredients, we have no choice but to utilise our reserve funds in order to keep the water project and remaining distributions to isolated groups running. With depleted reserves, we find ourselves in a precarious position that restricts our ability to respond to emergencies or absorb unforeseen costs.

With only enough funds to last us a few more months, we urgently need your help to keep our water and food projects running. Without these projects, the water and food insecurity already faced by many displaced communities in Calais would worsen. We are appealing to you for donations to reach our target for this emergency fundraiser, which will see us through the harsh winter months and enable us to continue our work into 2025.

The impact of your donation:

£15 pays for a food pack for a group of five people.

£130 buys a 1000L water tank.

£250 pays for our food bank subscription for one month.

£540 pays our water bill for one month.

Please donate! If you are unable to donate, please consider sharing our campaign to help CFC continue our work into 2025!

What else can I do to help?

Share. Share this crowdfunder online and with friends and family. Speak with those close to you about the humanitarian emergency in Calais and the urgent need for support.

Fundraise. Supporters have previously sold art, held supper clubs, and organised club nights to raise funds for CFC! New ideas for fundraisers are always welcome and you can email us if you would like some support in creating your own: calaisfoodcollective@gmail.com.

Raise awareness. Share information online and within your networks to bring attention to the serious human rights violations being perpetrated against people on the move in Calais. You can follow us on Instagram at @calais_food_collective and share our posts about the political decisions and policies driving the humanitarian situation in Calais. If you are interested in hosting an event to raise awareness of the situation in Calais and the border politics creating these conditions, feel free to reach out to us.

Volunteer. We have no managers or salaried positions in the collective and our projects are run entirely by volunteers. We are always in need of new volunteers to join the collective, who can commit at least two months of their time to work with us in Calais. To sign up or find out more about what volunteering with the collective entails, email calaisfoodcollective@gmail.com.