The initiative first started last year after Futures’ Plumbing Engineer, Scott Bacon, came up with the 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 up again since Futures first spent them in May 2023, and this time round the East Midlands housing association was able to buy over £150’s worth of food and toiletries to then donate to foodbank, Hope for Belper.
Futures chose Hope for Belper once more as it’s local to where many of the association’s 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.
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 cereal box.”
Jo Lambourne, who’s volunteered at Hope for Belper since it began in 2009, said: “Donations like this make a huge difference, we couldn’t run this without the donations we receive from the community.
“When we first started we were doing less than 100 parcels a year and in 2023 we handed out well over 3000. Our referrals are increasing all the time, but our donations are not always keeping up.”