When I first started speaking about REfUSE 11 years ago, I loved telling the story of the word companion. It comes from the Latin com—“with”, and pan—“bread.” A companion is someone you share bread with. At my leaving party, treated to a huge bring-and-share buffet of food in a room full and buzzing with volunteers and staff old and new: I broke bread with my friends, people who have become such an important part of my life.
I can’t help but reflect on what we’ve achieved together in 11 years of REfUSE. Some stats:
- 11 years of rescuing food: 730 Tonnes of that would otherwise have gone to waste:
- By preventing food going to landfill we’ve saved 2,960 tonnes of CO₂ — that’s enough to heat the town of Chester le Street for 4 months, or to power around 14 million miles of driving. (About 1,350 homes for a year)
- A whopping 173,000 thousand meals cooked and shared in the cafe
- Almost 100,000 hours of volunteering
When we started in 2015, food waste wasn’t something supermarkets wanted to talk about. Bins were padlocked. Perfectly good food was slashed and doused in bleach so no one could eat it. We took pictures of the contents of wheelie bins in the early hours of the morning, and shared them on social media and in local papers. We left collection buckets with market stalls and greengrocers and ran monthly pop-up events in church halls and community centres.
When we catered a wedding using food that would have otherwise been wasted, it caused such a stir that it became the most-watched video on BBC World, briefly knocking ‘Obama’s mic drop’ at the 2016 Whitehouse correspondent’s dinner off the top spot.
Right from the beginning, as we scrabbled around in the bins behind supermarkets, cooking pumpkin soup in our little shared house kitchen, we could never have imagined it would have led to what we have today. Those early days were chaotic and scrappy, but they were the beginning of something powerful.
Over time, the conversation changed. Grassroots groups, celebrity chefs, and organisations like ours shifted public awareness. Suddenly, supermarkets were calling us, asking how to do better. Now, we collect from 27 different retailers, redirecting between eight and ten tonnes of good food every month. Our case studies have been used in Parliament to shape national food policy. We’ve won awards, built a volunteer team of 150 people, employ 16 permanent staff, and – I’ll say it again – we have served over 170,000 Pay As You Feel meals in the café. We’re making a huge impact in schools, we’re catering festivals, we’re running cooking workshops, and we’re selling hundreds of low-cost veg boxes that end up on kitchen tables across the county.
Launching crowdfunders, negotiating leases, coding websites, catering weddings, employing staff, building walls, buying fridges, fitting toilets… the journey has been a constant learning-curve, and I’ll be honest here, like many of our staff and volunteers, I’ve battled with a constant feeling of ‘we could do more’, and ‘must work harder’, as the organisation has grown and changed dramatically over those ten years. Working at REfUSE is full-on. It requires resilience, creativity, humour, and a willingness to roll up your sleeves for the unexpected. And I cannot say this strongly enough: those that keep the doors of Refuse open are some of the most incredible people I know.
But when you catch the vision of what we’re trying to do, when you make friends and find belonging in our eclectic and often chaotic community, it is hard to resist wanting to give it your absolute all. And oh my have we got some people in the room today who have done that. Whether it’s Maureen on her hands and knees scrubbing down the kitchen after serving at least 70 beautiful meals every Wednesday; Maz red in the face plating up puddings at the end of a fast-paced restaurant night; Paula doing BOTH of those things on the same day; Paul doing endless hours of washing up; Naomi skillfully getting a gaggle of excited kids to try new fruit or veg they’ve never had before; Jonny loyally going every day to the shops, loading and unloading all those boxes and tonnes of food, sorting the bins; Caroline, Irene, and Von baking and decorating what must be HUNDREDS of cakes by now; Bev doing all the loads of laundry every single week; Mim compassionately and discreetly working through a tricky safeguarding disclosure; Joanne caring for our customers with compassion and concern; Karen patiently working through VAT returns and ever-complex payrolls as we keep bringing on part-time staff or altered work hours; Nick reliably being here for hugs and entertainment and flavouried teas every week; Jo creating innovative plant-based tasting menus and leading fermentation courses; Oliver keeping up the positive energy in our staff team meetings whilst quietly suppressing his stress at a looming grant funding report deadline; Paige going above and beyond to help one of our volunteers write a CV and apply for their first job; Dave loading and unloading the van on Druridge Bay beach to cook breakfast for 500 by headtorch at 4 in the morning… I could go on and on and I’m sure I’ve missed some amazing people… But you know who you are. This place works because of you.
Across these years, we came to see that waste is only one part of what’s broken in our food system. Communities lack access to good, healthy food. Health outcomes are shaped by income and postcode. Many of us have lost the places where we eat together, and some of the skills needed to grow, cook, and share good food.
When I stepped back two years ago to do my master’s at the Centre for Food Policy, I finally had time to step out of the daily grind to see the whole picture of what we had built with clarity. I researched cafés like ours: places that serve nutritious food to all, with non-judgemental, affordable payment models, in accessible high-street spaces. These places—this place—don’t fit neatly into the academic definitions of food aid. They do SO much more than feed people, and so much more than reduce waste. They are spaces of belonging, agency, dignity, and purpose. They transform how people see themselves and their place in the community: and that in turn will transform our broken food system.
When school children are challenging major catering companies and NHS country-wide schemes; when meat-and-two-veg loyalists learn how to make broccoli quiche and share the recipe with their neighbours; when we’ve crowded into and spilled out of doors at the funeral of a loved volunteer who would have left us much longer ago and had a quiet family affair if it weren’t for us. When Kelsey overcomes her worries about dyspraxia and nails it as our chief barista, going on to become the manager at a huge Costa cafe; when Masoud learns English and offers to cut the hair of other volunteers, or Steve takes an older customer round to the barbers; when another volunteer in and out of prison most of their life makes great friends with a retired headteacher who gets him set up with a painting and decorating job. This is transformation: and it ripples out like throwing a pebble into a pond.
And our impact goes further than County Durham. People in Australia have messaged us after seeing Pay As You Feel explained on Songs of Praise. Syrian refugee families took inspiration from volunteering with us to contribute to the script of Ken Loach’s The Old Oak film. We’ve been on Channel 5, and BBC National news. We were included in Prof. Tim Lang’s groundbreaking report on civil food resilience. The ripples go far beyond what we see day to day: I wish we could all see the waves we have collectively made over the last ten years!
And so, it is with a very heavy but hopeful heart that I am stepping away from REfUSE. Mim and I founded the CIC in July 2015 but it’s grown beyond us. Part of our strategic plan was to move from “founder-led start-up” to “community leadership’ and it’s been amazing to see so many people step forward to lead the way at REfUSE. I am so proud of all we’ve achieved so far, and I know it will continue to thrive in the capable and talented hands of our staff and volunteer team. I’m especially grateful to my co-founder and best friend, Mim, whose continued dedication to REfUSE has helped steady the ship in this transition, leading our new team of Non-Executive Directors.
I am not going far, and I remain deeply passionate about the North East. I want to see a region where healthy life expectancy doesn’t differ by 18 years depending on your postcode. Where diet-related disease is no longer the leading cause of preventable early mortality. Where more of our food is grown regeneratively, and where every high street has spaces like this—celebrating diverse food culture, creating good jobs, and giving people places to belong. The fire that was lit in me in 2015 is still burning and REfUSE will always be one of the most important parts of my life.
Thank you to all who have been with me on the journey, whatever part you played.
