A charity that delivers hot meals to people who can't cook for themselves has discovered a novel recruitment strategy: telling potential volunteers they'll pay for their own petrol. It's not going great.

Maureen Bougeard, secretary of Meals on Wheels Jersey, said the service had received £38,000 from the Jersey Community Foundation to fund its work supplying hot meals to islanders unable to prepare meals themselves. The grant, she said, has been offered for 2026 and 2027.

The organisation packs and delivers meals to about 100 people, four days a week - a tidy operation run entirely by more than 200 volunteers and precisely zero paid staff. "Our complete organisation is run by volunteers," Bougeard said. "We don't have any paid staff at all."

There is, however, one small snag: the volunteers have to drive, and driving now costs money. "Very often volunteers say, you know, 'the petrol's getting expensive'," Bougeard said. "We're looking for new volunteers and I send the information out which says 'you drive your car at your own expense' and I don't hear from them again." The silence, one imagines, is deafening.

Some of the voluntary drivers cover the length of the island twice in a single day, and most volunteers are retired people. "I'm not saying everyone has a poor pension, not everyone is on the basic pension, but some are and they still manage to come and volunteer, which is absolutely fabulous," Bougeard said - a sentence that manages to be both a compliment and a quiet indictment of the economics involved.

Recipients currently pay a cost price of £5 for their meals. The grant from the Jersey Community Foundation covers the charge to the government of Jersey's health and community services, which supply and facilitate the preparation of the meals.

Meals on Wheels said it hoped to renegotiate the service level agreement with the government to allow it to continue. Because nothing says "sustainable community service" quite like hoping the terms of a government contract improve before the petrol money runs out.