In April 2020, I found a job in a food bank in West London.
At first I felt useful. I had experience working in other service delivery charities, and I could put my skills and knowledge to work quickly. Given the context of the growing pandemic, everything felt urgent and unprecedented. But it felt good to be using my hands, being active, and meeting our volunteers and customers. It felt like every day that I went to work I made a difference.
Filled with a sense of purpose, I got to work. I collected donations from supermarkets, I sorted stock, I took the van out delivering food parcels, and I helped customers collecting from our centre. The lessons I’d been taught at my church school growing up – of service, self-sacrifice, having compassion for those less fortunate than myself – were being triggered every day. So I worked myself harder and harder, as demand for our service grew and grew.
But after a while I realised something: yes, the pandemic had exacerbated the demand for food banks (my West London food bank saw a 500% increase in demand at our peak in June 2020 compared to the same month the year prior). But the reasons bringing people to the food bank were the same as they’d always been. I had the same conversations with people every day about what had brought them to us: elderly people whose pensions just didn’t stretch far enough, who couldn’t afford basic necessities, let alone to turn on their heating; parents on the minimum wage, whose shifts had been cut at work again so they couldn’t afford to put food on the table; asylum seekers living in the local hotel where the food was inedible, being paid only £8 a week to cover everything else.
I would hear these heart-breaking stories, and all I could do was say, “I’m so sorry. Come back next week.” And so they did. Week after week they came back to us, and nothing about their lives changed. I felt completely powerless.
The world as it should be – the world I dream of – is one where food banks do not need to exist. But if I never changed the way I was working, if I continued treating the symptoms of these problems, rather than the cause, how could that world become a reality? I realised there was a limit to the impact I could have if I continued handing out food parcels every day and didn’t address the systemic problems our customers were facing. To quote the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu:
“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”
These big, systemic issues can be overwhelming to think about as an individual. What power do I alone have to change the way the benefits system works? Or to change the minimum wage? Arguably not much. That’s where I see the role of community organising coming in.
I now work as a community organiser at Citizens UK. We’re the home of the Living Wage Foundation, which now has over 14,000 accredited employers who all opt in to pay their workers the real Living Wage. In my work I meet low-paid workers, community leaders, and business leaders who all care about the issue of low pay and want to do something about it. Collectively we campaign together, we develop the leadership potential of ordinary people to take action, and we think seriously about power: who has the power to make the change we want to see, and how do we get around the negotiation table with them?
Now, when I meet someone struggling to make ends meet because they can’t get enough shifts and their wages are too low, I can say: “do you want to join a team of people taking action in our city to make sure people like you are paid fairly?”
Last month the Living Wage Foundation released a report that shows that more than half of low wage workers in London used a food bank this year. The need for food banks is not going away any time soon. We have a choice to accept that reality, or try to change it.
Who I am today is shaped by my upbringing in the church. My values, my sense of right and wrong, the indignation I feel in the face of injustice – these are things that were consciously and subconsciously formed by Christian teachings. How I now choose to use the skills and gifts I was given is shaped by my experience at the food bank.
I hope you join me in looking upstream.
For information about how your church can become an accredited Living Wage Employer, see the Living Wage Foundation’s website.
Additional information, training, and resources – including a Living Wage Toolkit – can be found on the Compassionate Communities Living Wage webpage.
