History
One Can started in 2011 with a few cans stored in a cupboard at St Andrew’s Church in Hatters Lane.
It quickly became apparent that there was a growing need for food support in High Wycombe and One Can moved to a locker at Big Yellow. The organisation was registered as a charity in 2012 and in 2014, the Wesley Church in High Wycombe became a distribution hub. This allowed people to pick their parcels and enjoy a cup of tea afterwards.
Demand for food parcels continued to rise and by 2015, One Can was providing around 100 food parcels a week for 230 people. In the summer of 2016, we moved to the current warehouse in Duke Street.
The COVID pandemic was a challenging time, as it was for so many people. We had to close our self-pick hubs (of which there were seven) and almost overnight, organise a team of volunteer drivers to deliver food parcels directly to peoples’ homes. We still operate the delivery model to this day.
During lockdown, people were no longer visiting supermarkets and food donations, in the customer donation baskets, dried up. It was at this point that the brilliant Street Hero initiative was borne whereby people collected food from their friends and neighbours and delivered it to our warehouse in Duke Street. Over 300 amazing Street Heroes have collected food to date and we believe that during the first lockdown, 90% of food came from the incredibly hard working and passionate Street Hero team.
Street Heroes still supply a significant and valuable proportion of our donated food and new Heroes are always very gratefully welcomed to the team. Please visit the Street Hero page for more information about what’s involved.
We are enormously grateful to everyone who has supported us and contributed food, time and advice along our journey to date. With this support, we have been able to promptly fulfil all requests for food parcels from our referring partners.
Our Vision is to be here in South Bucks to help anyone in our local community who is desperate with hunger, for as long as we need to.
