Give Food

I'd actually been looking at The Felix Project for this month, who have a scheme where every donation that you give is doubled. They're a wonderful charity who take surplus food from suppliers and distribute it to those in need. It both reduces food waste and helps those in need.

They're not always listed on 'most effective' lists however, so I went to Reddit to see if anyone had some comments about them. There wasn't much negative feedback but a lot of people mentioned that giving to your local food bank can be the most direct way to help. Digging further, a few people mentioned Give Food. I went to the website and it seemed like everything Tithe is about; they're clear about what they do, extremely transparent about their finances, and do their job effectively. The basic idea is providing data to highlight local and structural food insecurity, and then provide tools to help alleviate it.

I'll quote their 'About' section on their website as it's incredibly to-the-point:

"We run the only national public database of food banks, tracking in realtime what they are requesting to have donated.

Working with a wide variety of public and private organisations, including many other charities, we share our data with millions of users each year, helping people learn about and engage with food poverty causes.

We became a charity in February 2020, just weeks before the UK entered COVID-19 lockdowns, and since then we've worked with hundreds of local food insecurity alleviation organisations delivering hundreds of tonnes of vitally needed supplies.

We help our users act on food insecurity by using our data to show which food banks are in their parliamentary constituency, and provide a tool to easily email their Member of Parliament asking what action they are taking to remedy it.

Our operations are open source and transparent, with almost all of our current and historical code, data and financial accounts available to view."

It's easy to overlook how valuable a service like this is, and as you'll read about  below, it's used a huge amount by everyone from government bodies to local charities to single individuals. Over 200,000 items have been requested through the tool with over 150,000 meals delivered. It may not be the sexiest charity but it certainly is effective, and it feels good to contribute to what is effectively the backbone of so many other food insecurity charities.

Some Give Food wins in 2023:

• During the year, around 4 million people viewed the Charity’s food bank need data.

• The Charity's data was used as part of studies of food poverty by multiple universities, political parties and by the NHS.

• The Charity built a tool that allows users to write an email to their MP describing food poverty in their constituency.

• The Charity made 7.6 tonnes of their own deliveries, containing around 17,000 items and 5.5m calories. Half of this was done in November and December.

• The Charity continues to maintain the UK's largest and most complete database of food banks covering 2,620 locations (up from 2,422 last year, and 2,329 in 2020).

• The Charity’s software checked food bank websites for what they needed around three million times in 2023, and found around 47,000 items requested. 

• The Charity’s API responded to around five million requests for data in 2023.

• The Charity’s email subscription tool now sends thousands of emails a month to people who want updates on what their local food bank needs. 

Our donation was £350 and you can read more about it here.