Fuelling foodbanks with Futures' mileage

Futures colleagues went wild in the aisles again at a local supermarket to donate much needed items to a Derbyshire foodbank.

The initiative first started last year, after Futures’ Plumbing Engineer, Scott Bacon came up with the brilliant idea of using the Nectar points colleagues earn from filling up their work vans, to spend on a supermarket shop to donate to foodbanks.

Scott said: “We offer lots of support to our customers at Futures, from money advice, to helping customers get jobs. But I was thinking, what else can we do? At one of our main depots, we mostly fill up our vans with petrol at the Sainsbury’s in Ripley. I looked on their website to see if we could get a company card, so all the points from the vans being filled up went into the same pot.”

The Nectar points have been building again up since we first spent them last year, and this time round we were able to buy over £150’s worth of food and toiletries to then donate to foodbank, Hope for Belper. We also gave them an extra £100 in cash after a recent auction we held with colleagues too.

We chose Hope for Belper once more as it’s local to where many of our customers live and relies on public donations as it doesn’t receive any grants or funding. The shopping list focused on items the foodbank regularly runs out of, including tinned food, pasta, biscuits and cereal - and off colleagues went for supermarket sweep, the return.

Kyra Thompson, Resource and Materials Coordinator at Futures said: “Knowing this shop was going to help people felt great, but the reality of counting pennies and striking the balance of quantity and quality soon hit as we were walking around the supermarket.

“It’s a sad realisation knowing that the people using the foodbank don’t have money to even go to the supermarket, something that many of us may not even think twice about when we’re buying our weekly shop. For some of our customers, it’s not a case of just easily popping to the shops when you’ve ran out of toilet roll or reached the end of a box of cereal.”

You can hear from Hope for Belper, as well as seeing how the shop went in the video below.