The Softcat News Team
Graeme Watt, CEO of Softcat plc, is appealing to the IT industry to support a charitable campaign intended to raise money to ‘Feed the Nation in Isolation’ specifically the homeless, the ‘food poor’ and those who normally rely on free school meals for their children.
The ‘Feed the Nation in Isolation’ initiative has been created by Josh Littlejohn, founder of charity Social Bite. In response to the COVID-19 global crisis, Social Bite has re-purposed their entire organisation to create a nationwide food delivery service. Their kitchens, cafes and teams have been entirely re-deployed to produce and deliver food and supplies to those who need them most for the duration of this outbreak. Working with partners, they are ensuring that food and essential supplies can reach homeless people, families that were relying on free school meals and now have no access and those who have been made redundant due to the crisis and are now in food poverty. This campaign started in Scotland but the charity is keen to raise more funds to support food banks throughout the UK as well.
There are three key steps in supporting the initiative:
1. Make a meal with 5 ingredients and share a pic to social media
2. Donate £5 to the Social Bite JustGiving page to help feed those in need here: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/joshua-littlejohn
3. Nominate 5 other people to do the same!
Please get cooking and nominating to help feed those in desperate need during Covid-19 and beyond. You can start the ball rolling, no need to wait to be nominated!
Use the hashtag #FeedTheNationInIsolation
Graeme Watt comments “Softcat has a long history of supporting charities which work to improve the lives of people in the local community but the Social Bite campaign is one that really moved us. All of us have had to sacrifice something as part of the government lockdown but food is a necessity. Our Softcat team are getting right behind it and we already have Cisco and
other big industry names on board and committed to supporting it and our ambition is to make it go viral across the industry and the whole country. It is such a fun, simple yet effective campaign so I am urging all our IT colleagues to unite with us and support Social Bite to help ‘Feed the Nation in Isolation.’”
Josh Littlejohn from Social Bite says of the campaign “Since March 20th we have been producing and distributing free food to homeless people and other vulnerable groups. We have so far given away an incredible 100,000 emergency food packs but are looking to scale up our production from 4500 to 6500 packs every single day from now until the end of June. We are so grateful to have Graeme and the Softcat teams support to help spread the word and raise much needed funds during this challenging time for many families stuck in isolation.”
Social Bite tackles homelessness and food poverty on a national scale. It operates five social enterprise cafes that offer free food to those in need, with 1/3 of the workforce having struggled with homelessness.