The Trussell Trust thinks of itself as a temporary structure that would seek to dismantle at the earliest possible opportunity, its chief executive has said in a new podcast published today.
Speaking in the first episode of Third Sector’s documentary podcast series The End of Charity, which explores the challenges faced by modern charities and alternative forces disrupting the for-good landscape, Emma Revie describes the “devastating” rise in demand her organisation has experienced as a result of the UK’s food poverty crisis.
In 2023, the charity supplied about three million emergency food parcels, one million of which were for children, according to Revie, up from about 60,000 a decade ago.
“It’s devastating when I speak to our food bank managers; they tell me so often how insufficient a food parcel feels to the need that people are telling them about,” she said. “It’s just not enough.”
Revie said that in 2023, 780,000 people visited a Trussell Trust food bank for the first time.
“When you are seeing the scale of need and the scale of response you have to question: what is going on here? What do we want for our society, what is our social contract with one another? Do we think it’s OK that so many families are finding themselves unable to buy food?”
Rhodri Davies, the founder and director of Why Philanthropy Matters, said charities taking both “upstream and downstream” approaches to tackling these issues was vital.
“A lot of organisations and charities individually try and do both but there is room within the charity sector as a whole for these different approaches,” he said.
“Something is fundamentally broken, so let’s understand what that is and campaign for the necessary changes to the ways that politics and society works to make sure that doesn’t happen in the future.”
Revie also said that the Trussell Trust did not think of itself as “part of the ongoing fabric of civil society”.
She said: “For many charities it is going to be really important for the fabric of our society that those charities be here for a long time to come. We don’t view ourselves in that way.”
She said that she would rather see the volunteers who support The Trussell Trust’s work deployed elsewhere across the sector in a world in which there was no longer any need for the food bank network.
“We love the idea of what would happen if the 40,000 volunteers who are gathering food, providing food and creating those spaces were doing something else within civil society and providing different support because we no longer distributed emergency food aid,” Revie said.
“We don’t think of ourselves as part of the ongoing fabric of civil society but rather a temporary structure that we would seek to dismantle at the first available moment.”
For the full interview, listen to The End of Charity: The food bank era on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your podcast platform of choice.