Role Summary:

The Food Sharing Hub is the beating heart of Food Sharing Edinburgh activities. It handles a variety of excess food that has been collected from our partner businesses. These include bakeries and supermarkets. Food will be offered to the general public 3 days a week, on a Pay As You Feel basis.

The Food Sharing Hub is located at 22 Bread Street. Your role is to help maintain the day to day running of the shop, creating a positive and welcoming environment in the process. We strive to create a wonderful community space, where people from all walks of life are encouraged to lessen their environmental impact by purchasing food that would otherwise have been wasted.

As part of this role, you will work alongside the Food Sharing Hub Store Coordinator to carry out the following variety of tasks: serving customers, managing stock, keeping the space clean and tidy, ensuring all food is fit to consume, and calculating earnings at the end of each day.

Depending on your preference, you may decide to have a more ‘people heavy’ or ‘behind the scenes’ role. The shop floor will definitely require people skills! The pantry, however, involves keeping the back area tidy and organised, and would involve little interpersonal contact. You may, of course, do a variety of both throughout your shift!

The FSH will be open from Thursday to Saturday, 12:00 to 16:00

Hours: min 2.5hrs, max 15hrs per week.

Shifts: Opening (11:30 - 14:00) and Closing (14:00 - 16:30), Thursday, Friday, Saturday.

Responsibilities:

• Opening: bringing food in from pantry (involves some heavy lifting); making space and food presentable; setting up computer and till
• General: Serving customers; being friendly; telling people about food sharing; keeping space tidy
• Closing: informing customers; putting food away; deciding what needs to be discarded; cleaning floor and shelves; counting money to ensure float, and putting rest in envelope
• Consistency and punctuality: we want to count on you to be there! Please arrive at your shift 5-10 minutes early!
• Act with integrity, make sure everything is done fairly and professionally - make yourself familiar with SHRUB’s safer spaces policy to ensure non-discrimination.
• Use your initiative. Look around and see what needs to be done, and prioritise what should be dealt with first!
• Respect the customers and volunteers.
• Greet people who come in the shop warmly and make them feel welcome - one of our central aims is to create a community space!
• Keep the space clean and in accordance with the Food Standards Agency guidelines - becoming familiar with the health and safety policies and recording your activities on the cleaning checklist. This is very important as we could get a random H&S inspection at any time
• Get to know the space. Familiarise yourself with the guides, use your curiosity to see what is in that mysterious drawer, get to know this quirky place.

Meet up once in a while with the Food Sharing Hub Store Coordinator to have a check-up and see how things are progressing.

Training information:

• For your first shift: we will induct you and show you how things are done
• For your second shift: you do things with a more experienced volunteer checking that it’s all ok
• For your third shift: you can fly the nest as a strong independent volunteer, although there’s always people around to help you and to bounce questions and ideas off.
• Special training for FSH volunteers include (but is not limited to): First Aid, Customer Service, Communicating Carbon & Sustainability

Rewards and benefits:

• Food and drinks to sustain your energies through the shift
• Gain experience in the Third Sector, Co-operative Business, Social Enterprise, Retail, and Sustainability.
• Support from the FSH store coordinator, other volunteers, and the Welfare Working Group
• Regular social events and opportunities to get together with the rest of the Shrub
• Support when going on to employment
• • With references
  • With other aspects such as help framing your volunteer experience in the most impressive light possible.
• First dibs on stuff that comes in through the Food Sharing Hub and Swapshop!
• Great experience working for Edinburgh’s only Sustainability Co-op, on the front-lines of public perception-changing
• Training and personal development opportunities
• A warm fuzzy feeling that you’re doing a great thing for Edinburgh, the community, and the environment!