Food For London Now: A big ten as Strictly’s Shirley Ballas joins our appeal to help feed London

Strictly star Shirley Ballas gave our Christmas appeal 10 out of 10 as she joined the Evening Standard to prepare and deliver meals to vulnerable Londoners.

She hailed our campaign as “eye-opening” as she accompanied our charity partner, With Compassion, through a day of food preparation and delivery.

The Strictly Come Dancing head judge said: “It touches the heartstrings when you help people get a basic meal. I come from a council estate. I had free school dinners — I find it quite emotional.”

Ballas and her partner Daniel Taylor, who is an actor, visited the historic London Scottish House in Westminster — which has been lent to the Standard’s Food For London Now appeal as a “dark” kitchen to produce meals for delivery.

The couple chopped peppers for a chickpea stew and spinach and lentil wraps. With Compassion produces 1,000 meals per day in the kitchen, using fresh ingredients donated by The Felix Project, the Standard’s other charity partner.

Taylor, who also received free school meals as a child and has experienced homelessness, said that he wanted to help dispel the social stigma of receiving help.

Let’s Feed London Now!

This November and December, together with our sister title The Independent, we will be delivering food directly to 1,000 Londoners a day through our partner With Compassion. Please donate here to help ensure no Londoner goes hungry this Christmas.

He said: “When we used to queue up for free dinners you’d feel a little bit inferior. You shouldn’t feel bad about struggling at the end of the day.” The couple then travelled to deliver the meals to Living Way Ministries on the Grahame Park Estate, the largest housing estate in Barnet.

Living Way is a community centre that offers family support and a foodbank for the local community. A Barnet council assessment from last year estimates that half the children in Colindale, the district in which the estate is located, live in poverty after housing costs.

Pastor Hope Yoloye, the charity’s founder, said: “Winter has a crisis of its own, especially for the elderly, for the disabled, young children. And then put Covid on top if it, it’s a double whammy. Every single one of us has a responsibility to be the voice for the voiceless and to be the hands to the withered, to be the legs to the lame so together the world is a better place.”

Ballas and Taylor unloaded the hot meals and set up a table outside the centre where a queue of a few dozen had gathered.

Andrea Koval, who helps support the local homeless population for the charity, explained that many of those in the queue lead normal lives that have been disrupted by the pandemic. She said: “You don’t have to be homeless to be without any money. Because of Covid, a lot of people have lost their jobs or they can’t work as much. They need food.”

The Evening Standard’s Food For London Now appeal supplies meals to frontline charities, schools and individuals who have been affected by Covid-19. It aims to establish a durable solution to food poverty in London.

Ballas remains hopeful that London’s communities will rise to the challenge. “People have been checking on neighbours and communities and have really come together to help one another. I think the country was missing that.”

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