they told us that food volumes from our suppliers typically increase in the days leading up to and the days after a natural disaster, or an extreme weather event. Any time there is a storm, our supplies spiked. If anything like that happens now, we prepare for it. Making decisions on where our food goes is challenging. It is not uncommon for us to send apples from one place to another far away. If we can get apples from Aberdeen and keep them in Aberdeen, rather than sending them up from the other end of the country, that is a much better outcome for the environment. Data is therefore crucial to determine where food is most needed and where it can have the greatest impact. The data dive was particularly useful. It stretched our thinking as an organisation and set us on a path to start to use data in different ways operationally. We have since appointed an analyst to further support our decision-making processes. A FAIR ALLOCATION With the FARE Project – the Fair Allocation and REdistribution of food – we are using publicly available datasets across our regions to help us create an automated system of allocating food. An algorithm based on population, social deprivation, the social value generated by charities, and regional centre capacity/demand will help us to ensure that our supplies have the biggest impact. A key thing about FareShare is our food should be a hand up, not a handout. It should be a connector to people and services, rather than just food aid. We require all our charities to provide additional auxiliary services above and beyond just providing food parcels. If we have two charities who both do signposting to other organisations, but one version of signposting is a poster on the back of a toilet door, and the other version is a Citizens Advice Bureau advisor on site five days a week, clearly one generates more social value than the other. We are starting to identify those groups that squeeze more social value out of our food. The seed of this project was with Lancaster University and the PhD students. It is having a real impact right across the country in terms of what we do. And this is just the start of the longterm impact our work with Lancaster has had; it has been amazing working with everyone there. Thanks to the fruits of this collaboration, we can ensure more of those two million-plus people using foodbanks are able to put meals on their tables every evening. FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 21 Carl Hawkes is Director of Operations at FareShare. FareShare is the UK’s national network of charitable food redistributors, made up of 18 independent organisations. They take good quality surplus food from across the food industry and supply nearly 9,500 frontline charities and community groups. The STOR-i Centre for Doctoral Training is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and operates across Lancaster University Management School and Lancaster University Faculty of Science and Technology. It trains researchers in Statistics and Operational Research and works with industrial partners both in longterm collaborations and to solve one-off problems.
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