Foodball: How to organise a food drive in your local community

Richard Foy, 23, is a Youth Development Officer, Motherwell Enthusiast, and Humanitarian Superman. Here he speaks to our Comms Officer about his charitable adventures in community food-raising.

Hi Richard. Why are you sitting at my desk?

You asked me to come through.

Really?

To investigate my recent food bank initiative.

Oh. What is your recent food bank initiative?

Basically, me and a few of my friends who go to Motherwell games together decided enough wasn’t being done in the local community for those who weren’t as fortunate as us.

What do you mean?

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of deprivation and unemployment in North Lanarkshire. People with families are struggling to afford the basic necessities in life, like their weekly shop. So we felt that because of our influence in the community we could use it as a way of trying to help out.

What influence in your community? Do you have mafia connections? Are you members of the landed gentry?

We’re a well-known group of people called ‘The Motherwell Boi’s’ that go to the Motherwell games to create an atmosphere. We sing at the football and take flags and things like that, to add colour and noise to the matches. The group numbers vary from about 30 – 100 depending on the week.

So what did you do for the food drive?

One of our group spoke to a local food bank, called Basics Food Bank, and they said there was a shortage of food compared to demand. So we spoke with each other and decided to hold a food drive to drum up support for it. We mostly used Facebook and Twitter to engage all the Motherwell supporters and the official team also made a post on the website to promote it.

Where did you gather the food?

We decided to hold a food drive on a Saturday when Motherwell were playing, and encouraged fans to bring food to the match. We set up a collection point where they could come and drop off food and make donations to the food bank. It took us by surprise the number of people who actually brought food on the day.

How much food was there?

We gathered a transit-van’s worth of food, which Basics Food Bank had arranged to collect just before the game kicked off. We also took cash donations, we must have gotten about £100 or so.

Amazing! Was it all quite easy to organise?

Definitely. We’d do it again. We’re also looking into other initiatives to see how we can help in the local community.

So what advice would you give to someone who wanted to do the same thing?

Firstly, don’t be afraid to get involved. You can either do it yourself or with a group. Get in touch with a food bank and check that they’re ok for you to collect food for them. We managed to get the Basics Food Bank banner up at our stall so that people knew it was official.

Another thing is to make use of social media and friends to promote what you’re doing and what you’re trying to achieve. Because of the group size we had, there was a core of say 20 people who were promoting it regularly. But if you ask people to share it, then it does grow – don’t be scared to get other people involved.

You mentioned before that the official Motherwell website helped promote it as well. How did that happen?

We got in touch with the club, because we’ve got quite close connections with them. We just emailed them and told them the details, what we were hoping to achieve, and asked them if they could send something out to promote it wider. We also spoke to them on the phone. They put adverts out on their website, Facebook, and Twitter.

Is there anything you’d like to add?

I’d say no effort is too small to help people in your community.

And here’s a tip: Be prepared for more food than you expect! We expected to be able to move it by car, but once we saw how much food was coming in we realised it wasn’t going to fit.