As inflation and energy prices soar, it’s grassroots organisations who are holding up the safety net for those trapped in poverty
14-15 Tripe Marketing Board and We Care foodbank
Earlier in the year we featured Ray Barron-Woolford on the cover of The Big Issue to highlight the work he was doing with his community hub in Deptford, South London. Just a few months later, Barron-Woolford’s We Care foodbank was looking at permanent closure after it received a £33,000 energy bill estimate for 2023. But it was saved by a Robin Hood-style fundraising odyssey, after a group of friends calling themselves the Tripe Marketing Board (TMB) stumbled across an accidental goldmine in the world’s fifth-biggest company.
The TMB use the name to promote their self-published books. One such book is Forgotten Yorkshire and Parts of North Derbyshire and Humberside. On Black Friday Amazon reduced its price from £10 to 99p. However, it was still paying the TMB full royalties for each sale.
“We noticed that we got a couple of sales at 99p and it was full commission. So we thought, well, yeah we’ve got to do something with this,” said Paul Etherington of the Tripe Marketing Board.
After using the group’s 21,000 followers as a sounding board to find a suitable partner to donate to, Etherington and Barron-Woolford struck up a deal that £2 a copy would go to We Care for the duration of the deal. Social media, neighbours and friends were all roped into the effort to buy as many 99p copies as they could. In the end, 7,468 copies were sold and £16,443 raised. That money saved the foodbank, allowing it to cover rent and bills for next year, and also buy food.
Barron-Woolford can now relax a little, though he’s looking at ways to change operations to run fewer fridges and use less energy in 2023, because, as he noted, “it would be obscene for all the money we’ve raised to be given to the energy providers”.
twitter.com/TripeUK givefood.org.uk/needs/at/we-care/
16 Katie Barry and teachers at St George’s Primary School, Gainsborough
There was no starker illustration of the cost-of-living crisis than when a primary school saw the need to open a foodbank to support its pupils and their families. Katie Barry, headteacher at St George’s Primary School in Lincolnshire, saw children return to school during the pandemic cold and hungry as higher living costs bore down on families. Barry and her staff set up a food stall, which hands out 680kg of food every
