Julia and Hans Rausing are launching a £10 million grants programme to support charities and food banks across the UK to help tackle the growing food poverty crisis.
Following the £3.5 million cornerstone donation to the Trussell Trust’s emergency foodbank appeal last month, Julia and Hans Rausing are launching the Food Bank Fund in which an additional £3.5 million will be donated. The Fund is open to all food banks across the UK.
The Fund will help food banks meet the rising demand across the UK as well as to assist with the well documented rising running costs. Applications open today and will close on 6th December; however, recognising the state of the immediate need, funding will be made available before the deadline date with grants starting from £500.
More information on the open application programme can be found here. The Fund hopes to have distributed all funds to successful applicants before Christmas.
The Fund has been established in recognition of the increasing use of food banks across the UK, with some 70% of food banks saying they may need to shrink the size of emergency rations this winter or turn people away.
In addition to the open application and Trussell Trust grants, Julia and Hans Rausing are supporting the following food related charities with their work to help the UK during this food crisis:
- FareShare: Having previously worked with FareShare and their food distribution network, Julia and Hans Rausing are donating £1.7 million to develop new food processing and freezing technologies to enable surplus fresh food to be stored instead of wasted. FareShare works with the food industry to get good-to-eat surplus food out to a network of nearly 9,500 charities and community groups.
- FoodCycle: The charity works to alleviate both food poverty and loneliness. Julia and Hans Rausing are donating £325,000 to FoodCycle to enable the charity to keep open their welcoming spaces as part of their ‘meet, eat and have conversations’ programme across London & the South East and the West Midlands.
- Feeding Britain: £200,000 will go towards providing urgent support to 20 of their affordable food clubs and pantries across the UK.
Julia and Hans Rausing are donating a further £775,000 to local food charities in London, Gloucestershire and East Cheshire where they have local connections.
Julia and Hans Rausing said “Food banks are facing an unprecedented crisis with demand reaching record levels. For the first time, they are giving away more food than they are receiving through donations which shows the gravity of the situation. Furthermore, in many cases, they are seeing significant increases in running costs compared to last year.
For this reason we are donating a total of £10 million of which £3.5 million is via an emergency open application fund to help as many food banks as possible support their local communities.”
Lindsay Boswell, CEO at FareShare said: “The cost of living crisis has seen demand for our food skyrocket, at a time when millions of people are being forced into food poverty. For many, the soaring cost of living is a bigger financial crisis than the pandemic. We’re incredibly grateful for the generosity of Julia and Hans Rausing, whose donation will make a huge impact on getting more good-to-eat surplus food to people who need it, rather than letting in go to waste.”
In the past two years The Julia and Hans Rausing Trust have launched two open Funds, the Charity Survival Fund and the Youth Centre Recovery Fund, distributing £26 million to over 500 charities across the UK.