Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
Social Justice

Changemakers: Lindsay Boswell, CEO of food waste charity FareShare

FareShare redistributes anything that isn’t sold or eaten and directs it to where it’s needed

FareShare

This week’s Changemakers Top 100 special edition features the world’s leading thinkers, shakers and agitators. Throughout the week we’ll be highlighting just a few online.

Nobody should be going hungry in one of the world’s richest countries – we can all agree on that. But poverty and hunger have been spiralling in the UK.

Lindsay Boswell, CEO of FareShare food waste charity, is a driving force in the fight to ensure everyone has access to healthy food: almost three quarters of a million people eat each week thanks to their work with 10,000 charities around the UK.

Reducing waste, redistributing anything that isn’t sold or eaten and directing it where it’s needed is what he has been doing with FareShare for the last decade. A growing field of work for FareShare which is set to increase this year is working with kids’ clubs to tackle holiday hunger.

And there was welcome news at the end of 2017 for their work when Environment Secretary Michael Gove announced £15m to create 250 million meals worth of food. This means that organisations that hold food, which are not able under current legislation to redistribute it, will from this year be able to make it available to FairShare and the charities they work with.

“We see this fund as principally for food producers and not the supermarkets,” Boswell explains. “Right now it actually costs farmers, manufacturers and packers a lot less to dump or recycle fresh, in-date food than to redistribute it to good causes – in part because of the cost of keeping the surplus food fit for human consumption. With the barriers to charitable food redistribution removed, businesses will no longer be penalised for doing the right thing with their food: using it to feed people.

Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
Read the full article in this week's Big Issue.
Find your vendor
Cillian Murphy fights the system

Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty

READER-SUPPORTED SINCE 1991

Reader-supported journalism that doesn’t just report problems, it helps solve them.

Recommended for you

View all
Disabled man may be forced to close his business after DWP slashed his Access to Work support
Access to work

Disabled man may be forced to close his business after DWP slashed his Access to Work support

The DWP is implicated in the deaths of hundreds of disabled people. Here's how to overhaul it
New work and pensions secretary Pat McFadden in the House of Commons
Benefits

The DWP is implicated in the deaths of hundreds of disabled people. Here's how to overhaul it

Here's when people will get their benefits from the DWP over Christmas in 2025
dwp benefits christmas/ bauble
Christmas

Here's when people will get their benefits from the DWP over Christmas in 2025

Kinship carers are sleeping on sofas and floors to keep children out of care, study finds
A person sleeping on a sofa wrapped in a duvet
Care system

Kinship carers are sleeping on sofas and floors to keep children out of care, study finds

Reader-supported journalism that doesn’t just report problems, it helps solve them.

Every day, Big Issue digs deeper – speaking up for those society overlooks. Will you help us keep doing this work?