Is this Impact?

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I strive to make a positive impact through my work, as many academics do. I also support colleagues to develop their own impact and am often asked by organisations to comment on their plans for creating change.

Graphic of the difference between activity and impact.

So often people think #Impact is what they did—making meals, donating #food or funds, volunteering. They then measure the significance of that activity in terms of its reach: millions of meals served, pounds donated, or volunteer hours.

But that’s not impact.

That’s activity.

The real questions are:

➡️ And then what happened?
➡️ Why does that matter?
➡️ How is the world better because of it?

If the answers to those questions are not compelling, then it may be time to rethink what you’re doing—and how you’re doing it.

This is why, in our recent report on food clubs, we didn’t just ask how many people attended or how much food was distributed. We asked whether food clubs helped people become more food secure, whether they improved diets, reduced anxiety about food, strengthened cooking confidence, and reduced reliance on emergency food support.

Those are the outcomes that matter because they tell us something about whether people’s lives are actually improving.

Measuring activity is important. But measuring impact means asking whether that activity has created meaningful change for the people and communities it was intended to benefit.

I’d be interested to hear: What’s the best example you’ve seen of an organisation moving beyond measuring activity to demonstrating real impact?

Launch of ‘Lets put hunger to bed’: A new campaign from Comic Relief and Sainsbury’s

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Since 2022 I have advised Comic Relief and Sainsbury’s on the Nourish the Nation Campaign. This campaign has now ended, but been replaced by ‘Let’s put hunger to bed’. I was asked to speak alongside Simon Roberts (CEO, Sainsbury’s) and Samir Patel (CEO, Comic Relief) at the celebration event hosted at Sainsbury’s headquarters. I wanted to share my talk.

Paula’s story is one covered in The Bread and Butter Thing’s podcast. These stories from real people who use their food clubs cover a range of topics and are very insightful. The other people mentioned are from interviews being conducted as part of a current research project looking at the impacts of climate induced price inflation on UK households who are already struggling to have the food they need to live thier best lives.

Paula described going from what she called a ‘normal life’ to not being able to buy a birthday present for her granddaughter after her husband suffered a brutal attack that left him unable to work.

Then she said this:

‘By the first Christmas after the attack, we were on our knees. I remember we had a loaf of bread and a packet of chicken crisps for Christmas dinner.’

What struck me about Paula’s story is how quickly an ordinary life can become fragile.

I’m a geographer at the University of Sheffield, and my work looks at how food insecurity is experienced in everyday life — not just as hunger, but as pressure, instability, and the erosion of resilience over time.

For the research with Comic Relief and Sainsbury’s, we surveyed more than 14,000 lower-income households across the UK to better understand the role food clubs play in people’s lives.

And what we found was that food insecurity is rarely a single crisis.

More often, it is a slow wearing down of people’s ability to cope.

A bereavement.
A health problem.
Rising costs.

Hours being cut at work.
Caring responsibilities.

And slowly, the foundations underneath everyday life begin to weaken.

One woman we spoke with —Donna — was in her forties. Her husband died the previous year, and she described struggling deeply with her mental health afterwards. Her adult son had moved back home because he was undergoing cancer treatment. They were both working, but things were still incredibly tight.

Donna also has Type 2 diabetes and needs to eat regularly because she takes insulin.

She talked about how, before joining the food club, she would skip meals so there would be enough food for her grandchildren, who live with them part of the week.

And then she said something very simple:
‘Kids come first, definitely.’

I think that sentence captures something very important about food insecurity in Britain today.

A huge amount of hardship is hidden.

Parents and grandparents absorb it quietly.
They stretch food.
Skip meals.
Keep the heating off.
Manage debts.
Make impossible calculations about what can wait and what cannot.

Donna carefully timed her heating so that when the children were there, they would at least be warm.

She talked about how transport costs could wipe out the money she needed for food.

She talked about making meals stretch with potatoes and soups.

That is not simply budgeting.

That is survival planning.

Again and again in the research, people demonstrated enormous skill, care, and resourcefulness.

One of the central findings from the study is that food insecurity is not simply about a lack of food.

It is what the report calls an ‘architecture of hardship’.

Housing.
Transport.
Health.
Energy costs.
And the constant struggle of trying to hold everything together.

These pressures interact and accumulate over time.

Importantly, the research also challenges a lot of assumptions.

First, people often imagine food insecurity as something that affects people outside of work.

But we heard from nurses, carers, pensioners, parents, and people working multiple jobs.

Second, the issue was not that people did not know how to cook or budget.

Many households experiencing food insecurity were already highly skilled at coping.

The issue was that people were trying to manage impossible pressures for prolonged periods of time.

One of the important findings from the research was that food clubs and food banks are not the same thing — and they are not competing with each other. In the report, I describe this through the Food Ladders approach: different forms of support helping people at different moments of hardship and recovery.

Food banks provide emergency support during an acute crisis.

But food clubs often operate differently.

They provide continuity.
Choice.
Fresh food.
Routine.
Social connection.
And importantly, dignity.

Donna described how the food club meant she no longer had to skip meals herself because there was enough food in the house for everyone.

And because she was eating more regularly, she was better able to manage her diabetes and be there for her son’s children.

That is important.

This is not just about food parcels.

This is about people’s physical and mental health.
Their capacity to cope.
Their ability to care for others.

Another woman, Amy, described how the food club helped her multigenerational household of five women, ranging from aged 8 to 82, maintain access to vegetables and fruit that would otherwise become too expensive.

She talked about cooking collectively, sharing responsibility but also sharing food with other struggling families in the village.

What comes through is not dependency, but active care, skill, and mutual support.

That matters because resilience is social.

One of the strongest findings from the research was what we described as a buffering effect.

Food insecurity damages wellbeing across the board — physically, emotionally, and socially.

But people actively engaged with food clubs often appeared less isolated and more supported than we might otherwise expect, given the pressures they were under.

Both Donna and Amy described the people at the food club as becoming ‘practically a family.’

And I think that language matters.

Now, I do want to say something important here.

Food clubs are not a silver bullet.

No community organisation can solve poverty on its own.

No volunteer network can compensate for inadequate incomes, insecure work, rising housing costs, or weak social safety nets.

And this room reflects something very important: there is no single model that solves food insecurity.

Emergency food aid matters.
Community food projects matter.
Advice services matter.
Schools matter.
Local authorities matter.
Retailers matter.
National policy matters.

Different organisations are responding to different parts of the hardship equation.

But what food clubs help us see is that resilience is not built through food alone.

It is built through relationships.
Through continuity.
Through dignity.
Through creating spaces where people feel recognised and supported rather than judged.

And one of the findings I found most hopeful was that people who engaged with food clubs more regularly and over longer periods were more likely to be food secure.

That matters because it suggests we are not simply seeing emergency relief.

We are seeing the possibility of stabilisation.
Of recovery.
Of rebuilding.

And this matters enormously for children.

Because ultimately, well-fed children depend on well-supported adults and well-supported communities around them.

They need adults who are not constantly exhausted, anxious, isolated or forced into impossible trade-offs.

And that means tackling hunger is not just about responding to emergencies after they happen.

It is about building the conditions that allow people to live with dignity, stability, connection, and hope before a crisis becomes catastrophic.

That is why campaigns like Let’s Put Hunger to Bed matter.

Not simply because they help people eat tonight — though that is vitally important.

But because they help create the foundations from which people and communities can begin to rebuild resilience itself.

Thank you.

Here are the links to both Sainsbury’s and Comic Relief’s materials about the new fund.

You can find the research here, and another blog post where I talk about it a bit more.

Building Resilience: UK Food Clubs and Food Security

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I’ve been poor for so long that I’ve learned to live on one main meal plus one snack a day. I think most people would class that as ‘skipping’ a meal, but for me that’s just normal, and has been for many years now.’ (Non-Food Club User, YouGov survey, 2025)

In May and June 2025 I worked with YouGov to conduct a suvery of more than 14,000 UK households with earnings of <£40K and who lived in areas of greater deprivation (IMD quintiles 1-3). Comic Relief, as part of Sainsbury’s Nourish the Nation Programme, funded this research (UoS Project 12570).

The report of the findings, titled Building Resilience: The Role of Food Clubs in UK Food Security, is published on Comic Relief’s website.

This video, produced using Notebook LM, covers some of key highlights from the report.

In addition to specifics about the survey and methodology and recommendations, the report contains five substantive sections. These are:

  1. Analysis of food insecurity among the respondents.
  2. Analysis of food club use and survey respondent engagement.
  3. Analysis of the impacts of food clubs.
  4. A comparison of food club users to those who use no services, food bank users, and those who use both services.
  5. An analysis of why people stop using food clubs

Coverage of the report has included BBC radio interviews highlighting what food clubs are, an article in The Grocer, and two linked articles in The Guardian by Patrick Butler. These later highlight the elements of the study that demonstrate the difficulties rural people on low incomes face in accessing food.

The study makes recommendations for the government and provides evidence that local authorities can use when planning and implementing the new three-year Crisis and Resilience fund. Councils are now producing plans to implement the fund, and some have begun to signpost its resources. See, for example, how Sheffield City Council is implementing both the Crisis and Resilience (through Welcoming Places) elements of the funding.

The report’s findings are also likely to be useful to charities as they consider how to help their communities. This campaign raised over £26m and supported more than 2.4m people facing food insecurity, of which £7.7m went toward supporting 598 food clubs (see the impact report for more detail and this report by the Tavistock Institute.

The food club model is widely seen and experienced as impactful and life-changing, providing preventative and reparative support for households experiencing ongoing food insecurity as a result of financial precarity. It successfully assists those in need, while complementing, rather than replacing, emergency food banks. Food clubs help households stretch limited budgets, improve access to nutritious food, provide a welcoming space for social connection and create pathways to wider support services. (Tavistock Institute, 2026).

Examples of food clubs that were funded through the Nourish the Nation funding and how they are drawing on the Food Ladders incude:

Sainsbury’s and Comic Relief have launched a new campaign, Lets put hunger to bed, that builds on the foundations of the Nourish the Nation campaign and was informed by findings from this report. According to Comic Relief:

Our aim is to help end child and family hunger, ensuring families have the stability, resources and dignity they need to thrive. We will do this by supporting community-led organisations, with the aim to:

  1. Improve children and families’ health and wellbeing through access to good, nutritious food
  2. Strengthen family resilience to crisis and hardship through wraparound support
  3. Support longer-term change by bringing together communities, funders and decision-makers, and by advocating for policies that better support families.

This programme recognises that child food insecurity does not exist in isolation. Families are affected by wider pressures such as low income, insecure housing and rising living costs. Alongside practical support, the programme aims to improve the systems and policies that shape families’ lives.

Food resilience is a two-sided platform problem

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There is growing recognition that the UK needs to build greater food resilience. Tim Lang’s recent work is important here. It makes a compelling case for readiness: shorter supply chains, diversified sources of production, and stronger capacity to withstand shocks. That matters enormously. But readiness on the supply side is only half the story.

Food resilience is a two-sided platform problem.

It is not enough to ensure that food exists, or even that it reaches shops, distribution hubs, or community outlets. We also have to ask whether people can access that food in ways that allow it to become nourishment, care, and everyday security. Just because food is available does not mean it will get to the people who need it. And even if it does, that still does not guarantee it can be stored, cooked, shared, or eaten.

This is where community resilience comes in. As I argue in Building Resilience: The Role of Food Clubs in UK Food Security, food security is not only about what is in the system. It is also about whether people have access to community-based infrastructures that allow food to be obtained, stored, cooked, shared, and eaten in ways that support everyday life. Food clubs are one example of this broader resilience architecture.

In economically wealthy contexts such as the UK, the dominant mechanism through which people access food is through purchase in a market system organised primarily around profit maximisation. For many people, this works well enough most of the time. But it is also a fragile arrangement. It assumes that households have enough money, enough time, enough equipment, enough energy, enough transport, enough storage, and enough practical capacity to turn food into meals. When any of these are disrupted, access breaks down, even when food is technically present in the system.

That is the blind spot in many discussions of food resilience. We talk about supply, but not enough about access. We talk about availability, but not enough about use.

A resilient food system therefore needs more than diversified production. It also needs diversified consumption mechanisms: multiple ways for people to obtain and use food beyond the narrow logics of maximising sales and extracting profit. This may still include purchase, but through models where surplus supports sustainability rather than endless growth. It may also include sharing, gifting, barter, mutual aid, community growing, food clubs, social eating spaces, and other collective infrastructures of access.

Amartya Sen helps us think about this differently. What matters is not only whether food exists as a commodity, but whether people have real opportunities to access it through different means. These could include buying, but also sharing, gifting, own production, barter, or community exchange. I think of these as access channels: the practical routes through which food becomes available in everyday life.

This matters because highly “efficient” systems are often only efficient from the perspective of profit. They may be efficient at moving products, cutting slack, and concentrating market power, while being deeply inefficient for people, place, planet, and even food itself. If food is produced and distributed in ways that cannot be reliably turned into sustenance where it is needed, then the system is not truly resilient.

Building alternative access channels does more than help people at the margins. It strengthens the whole system. When households and communities have multiple ways to access food, they are less exposed to shocks in any single channel. And when non-maximising forms of provision exist alongside profit-driven ones, they also put pressure on the mainstream system to respond differently. They force greater attention to health, wellbeing, justice, and sustainability.

So yes, we need shorter supply chains and diversified production sources and methods. But that is not sufficient. We also need community resilience and diversified access channels. Food resilience is not just about making sure food is there. It is about making sure people can actually get it, use it, and benefit from it.

If we forget that, we risk building a food system that is ready for disruption in theory, but not resilient in practice.