The strategy process showed a real commitment to listening to those with lived experience. Being part of it reminded me that my voice matters – and that sharing my story can help drive meaningful change.
inform our new strategy
I’m proud to share Trussell’s strategy for 20252030, Together for Change: Ending Hunger
Together. Since our first strategy launched in 2020, food banks have stood at the heart of a society in flux. In that time, our network provided 13.3 million emergency food parcels – a staggering reflection of both the scale of hunger and hardship, and the incredible strength of our community of food banks.
Together, we’ve delivered vital financial advice, influenced policy, empowered communities, and shifted the national conversation around food bank need. Thanks to the generosity of our supporters, we’ve made huge strides toward our vision of ending the need for food banks in the UK. Thank you.
Yet there is so much more to be done. Our Cost of Hunger and Hardship report shows that 9.3 million people, including three million children, are facing hardship – a number that will rise without further action.
Over the next few pages, we’ll outline how we plan to tackle this and how, together, we can build a future where no one needs a food bank.
We hope you’ll join us.
Emma Revie, Chief Executive
In 2020 we published our first ever strategy, Together for Change – co-produced with food banks in the Trussell community and informed by people with experience of using a food bank.
Covering 2020-2025, the strategy focused on three priority areas where action was needed to achieve our vision: Changing Communities, Changing Policy, and Changing Minds.
This was a period of unparalleled change and challenges – including food banks being on the first line of response during the Covid pandemic, the impact of the cost of living crisis, and an ongoing economic and political uncertainty that has disproportionate effects on people experiencing hunger and hardship. And, yet, in the face of all this, we were still able to drive significant impact over the past five years – as shown by these statistics.
13.3M emergency food parcels were distributed by food banks in the Trussell community. Five million of those were for children.
110,000 tonnes of stock were donated to food banks.
£118.7M was provided in grants to food banks.
£467M+ in income gains and debt managed was achieved for people facing hardship via our financial inclusion projects – advising on money matters, social security and debt.
541,470 calls were handled by the award-winning Help through Hardship helpline, run by Trussell in partnership with Citizens Advice and Mind.
150,000 people signed the Essentials Guarantee petition to MPs, calling for social security payments to cover essential living costs.
1,634 references to food banks and 235 mentions of Trussell were made in the House of Commons (2022-2025), while addressing food bank need has now been embedded in multiple political party manifestos. We secured a manifesto commitment from the incoming Labour Government to end the mass dependence on food parcels.
The Scottish Government created a formal strategy to end the need for food banks.
87% of the UK public now believe the social security system should ensure that everyone can afford the essentials.
65% of the public are now aware of Trussell – up from 40% in 2019.
108,077 mentions of Trussell were made in the media.
745M impressions were achieved on our social media channels over the past five years.
9.9M social media engagements took place.
The journey towards our new strategy was named ‘Travelling together’ – reflecting the importance of working closely and collaboratively with a wide range of people and organisations to shape our priorities for the coming five years.
The strategy was informed by listening to those with different expertise and insight – as well as varying perspectives, priorities and approaches. Numerous consultation groups, one-to-one meetings, workshops and forums were held across the UK, involving:
• people with lived experience of financial hardship, meeting regularly with nine groups across the whole of the UK
• food banks in the Trussell community
• other food banks and community organisations providing charitable food support
• Trussell staff, volunteers and trustees
• UK-wide bodies, such as the Independent Food Aid Network, Feeding Britain and Salvation Army
• partners and experts, including government ministers and officials, charity sector partners, academics, funders, corporate partners, faith leaders and church organisations working in the social justice arena.
Regular consultation and engagement enabled deep discussion, input and genuine codesign at every stage – providing invaluable opportunities for reflection, for iterating our collective thinking around key issues, and for bringing back ideas to test and explore together.
Six main areas of emphasis emerged from the analytical work and engagement that informed our strategy:
• The importance of understanding and quantifying the full scale and texture of the need for food banks in the UK.
• The variety of community responses across the range of charitable food support, how they interconnect, and how to speak in a unified voice to address the causes of need.
• The importance of a warm welcome alongside the offer of emergency food, and its power to open doors to further support.
• The need for holistic support provided in a way that works for each individual.
• The ways in which we can persuade and influence for maximum impact, focusing on the key systems relevant to tackling hunger and hardship.
• Our collective capability to respond – across the Trussell community, and in collaboration with others.
Our strategic framework focuses on three key aspects of our work:
Supporting people facing hardship – with a warm welcome, emergency food, tailored support and access to advice. As we face a challenging political, economic and social outlook, we’ll need to continue to support significant numbers of people who are going without the essentials.
Working with others, in local communities and beyond –persuading and empowering people to play their part. We know food banks can’t solve hunger and hardship alone. To drive real change, we need to bring even more people with us.
Pushing for long-term changes to society, policies and mindsets – to tackle the causes of food bank need. To create change that lasts, we’ll continue challenging the systems and assumptions that leave people facing hunger and hardship – and that drive more people towards food banks.
To achieve our strategic goals, we will deliver eight programmes of work – each aligned to one of the three themes:
1. Food bank resilience
2. Sustainable holistic advice
3. Supportive communities
4. Unleashed leadership
5. Together with Trussell
6. Making social security work
7. Prioritising hunger and hardship
8. Knowledge transformation
As we face a challenging economic and social outlook, we know we’ll need to continue to support significant numbers of people who are going without the essentials over the coming years. In the face of sustained pressure, it’s important for us to redouble our efforts on those things we know to be critical when somebody is struggling – a warm welcome, emergency food, tailored support and access to advice.
Our community of food banks is under enormous pressure. We need to make sure that they can continue to meet huge levels of need – with the dignity and compassion that we know can be life changing for people facing hunger, and particularly for those who are facing it alone.
Key activities to include:
• Investing time, funding, expertise and partnership advice to ensure that every one of the 1,400 food bank locations in our community can provide an inclusive, warm welcome and guaranteed level of service to every person coming through their doors.
• Ensuring food banks are supported to be sustainable and strategic organisations that can navigate increasingly complex operational challenges. Given the economic and social climate, it’s vital that we protect what makes our food banks uniquely impactful in their communities.
Our ambition statement for 2025-2030
In a challenging economic and operational environment, we will work so that everybody who comes to a food bank in the Trussell community is offered an inclusive and warm welcome, a personalised support package, and three days’ worth of emergency food.
Between 2025 and 2030, we expect to guarantee this support for around five million people.
At our food bank, we know that how people are treated matters just as much as what they receive. A warm welcome, a listening ear, a chance to feel seen – these small things can make a huge difference when someone is in crisis. As we move forward with our new strategy, it means a lot to know that this kind of thoughtful, people-first work is being prioritised. Sometimes, change starts not with a big gesture, but with sitting down, offering a cuppa, and saying, “You’re welcome here.”
Crystal Clayton Senior Manager, Renfrewshire Foodbank
Over the past five years, we have supported food banks in providing access to financial inclusion services – as well as delivering direct support via our Help through Hardship helpline. In 2020, around a quarter of food bank charities in the Trussell community offered dedicated financial inclusion advice. By 2025, this had increased to over 90%.
This strategic investment highlighted the impact of access to tailored advice for people facing hunger and hardship, with a quarter of the people supported telling us they haven’t needed to return to a food bank.
In the coming years, we’ll remain committed to the role of advice in reducing food bank need.
Key activities to include:
• Providing expert support and funding to food banks in the design and delivery of supportive advice pathways, while addressing the need for access to holistic advice, including mental health support.
• Working alongside Citizens Advice on the delivery and development of our Help through Hardship helpline.
• Working with the advice sector to advocate for advice provision to be person centred, well targeted, and adequately funded at a local and national level, to ensure that anyone facing hardship can access tailored advice in their local community.
Our ambition statement for 2025-2030
We know that high quality advice can prevent somebody needing to return to a food bank. Our goal is that every person referred to a food bank in the Trussell community is offered specialist follow-up advice, with financial inclusion at its heart.
If we are able to retain our current level of on-site advice provision, we estimate that in the next five years this will secure at least £400m+ of financial gains and debt managed for people experiencing hunger and hardship.
Embedding advice and support in our food bank has been a hallmark of our work over the past years. As we look to the future, we’re excited about the possibility of working towards ensuring that every person who accesses our food bank is offered a tailored support pathway – and that we can work closer with our partner agencies to help make sure these services are sustainable.
Tessa Bradley Trustee, Llandrindod Foodbank
We know that the scale of ending hunger in the UK is well beyond our own capacity to deliver. Which is why we need to focus our efforts – at a local, national and UK-wide level – in building a dynamic, collaborative ethos where everybody can play their part. This means working with community members and partners locally, strengthening our skills at leading collaborative change, and reaching out to new audiences and sectors across the UK to bring even more people with us.
Since 2020, we’ve delivered pilots and programmes that help us better understand which resources, structures and practices are needed in local communities around food banks to help protect people from hunger and hardship.
We’ve amassed learnings on improving how food banks can coordinate their referrals and upstream support more effectively, about strengthening local partnership working, and the importance of community-based advice provision – as well as the impact of building power and agency at a local level, while working deeply with people who are facing financial hardship.
We now need to scale this best practice in collaboration, while developing policy recommendations that can help nurture a coordinated approach to reducing hunger and hardship at a local level.
Activities to include:
• Continuing to develop communities’ skills and confidence to work towards preventative change, funding food banks to recruit, train and support Community Guiders who can provide face-to-face guidance to connect people with local services and support.
• Evolving our Organising Programme, delivering intensive support to our community of food banks as well as development opportunities for others working across charitable food provision, focusing on training leaders in the skills to lead the anti-poverty agenda in their area.
• Fostering partnerships focused on community design and building stronger networks, so that people get the help they need at the right time – as well as mapping local services, building cross-organisational relationships and referral pathways.
• Harnessing the evidence from all this work to produce robust, shareable evidence on what is working well across communities to drive policy changes at both a local and national level.
We know that interpersonal connections, relationally-based services and strong local coordination help prevent people missing out on vital support. Over the coming five years, we’ll harness our presence in 1,400 local communities to help improve the ‘social safety net’.
By 2030, we will have worked intensively in at least 100 communities particularly affected by hunger and hardship, with food banks in the Trussell community modelling and leading community strategies that tangibly reduce the need for their services.
We recognise the vital role food banks play in local communities, especially in rural areas, where access to support can be limited. We see first-hand how the right help, at the right time, can be the difference between someone needing a food bank or not. That’s why it’s so important that we use our voices – not only as organisations, but alongside those with lived experience of poverty, to advocate for the support our communities deserve.
Ian Watling Manager, Pembrokeshire Foodbank
We know the challenges of enabling social change in the face of significant external pressure. When things are tough, it’s the leadership and collaboration skills of individuals that can harness difficulties and turn these into opportunities for partnerships and progress.
Over the past five years, we’ve worked intensively with more than a hundred food bank charities, piloting how support, training and experiential learning can help unlock leadership potential. In particular, we’ve invested significantly in equipping people who have direct experience of hunger and hardship to take the lead in changemaking.
In the coming years, we’ll scale access to this kind of approach, unleashing the leadership skills required to achieve our long-term vision.
• Facilitating a new approach to sharing best practice in leadership and problem-solving between food banks in the Trussell community, including buddying, thematic learning groups and transformational leadership training for trustees.
• Enabling this kind of investment in leadership through the provision of funding and central support roles to release time and capacity.
Our ambition statement for 2025-2030
Activities to include:
• Launching a social change leadership programme with a focus on collaboration – between Trussell’s food bank community and the wider community food sector, and between people with lived experience of hunger and hardship and people who don’t have this direct lived experience.
Over the past five years, our Pathfinder and Organising programmes have reinforced that driving change locally and nationally requires confidence, connections and credibility. Between 2025 and 2030, we’ll be equipping thousands of local leaders from within food banks in the Trussell community, as well as across the wider food aid community, with the skills and training to make lasting change.
By 2030, we will have built a social change leadership network spanning over 300 local hubs around the UK.
At our food bank, we’ve seen first-hand the impact of equipping people from the community with the leadership skills and opportunities to advocate for change. Having people with lived experience of poverty come together to contribute, shape and propose local solutions has helped us to enable positive change in our local community. We’re therefore excited about seeing more of these opportunities happening all across the Trussell community – and beyond.
Peter Maloney CEO, Hospitality & Hope (South Tyneside Foodbank)
Our vision is ambitious – and cannot be achieved by Trussell and our community of food banks alone. We know that we must work in active partnership with others.
Insights gained from our 2024 brand refresh demonstrate that a unique attribute of our work is about bringing diverse groups together to focus on a common goal, building trust and connections.
Over the next five years, we will strengthen support for our collective mission across all the audiences who could partner with us – including donors, campaigners, volunteers and champions.
Activities to include:
• Growing the number of ways in which people can take action to support our mission – and increasing take-up of these through catalytic partnerships and effective engagements.
• Developing content that tells the story of our mission in compelling ways and helps people from all backgrounds understand how they can play their part in ending the need for food banks.
• Ensuring that we leverage the maximum support for the delivery of our mission – building reciprocal relationships with donors, campaigners, partners and amplifiers.
Our ambition statement for 2025-2030
As a community of charities in over 1,400 locations with 40,000 volunteers, a wider network of over 28,000 referral partners, and thousands of supporting schools, community groups, faith groups and businesses, we know how to build a movement. Over the coming years, we want to harness this movement to help sustain and strengthen our work – through donations, partnerships, collaborations and campaigns.
By 2030, we aim to have increased the general public’s awareness of Trussell, food banks and our partnerships from 65% to 80%, and facilitated more than a million actions for change.
A really important part of our work together is making sure that we have enough resources and support to keep pushing onwards. As a local food bank in Rugby, it spurs me on knowing that I’m working as part of a bigger community of food banks, and that collectively we have millions of people behind us who are donating food, volunteering their time, campaigning or offering financial support.
Adi Robinson
To create change that lasts, we need to tackle the systemic drivers of hunger and hardship. Improving the ways in which policies can help prevent financial hardship, and in which wider society responds to food bank need, is vital to delivering a step change in our mission. This means continuing to push for changes in both policies and perceptions around social security, challenging society and key sectors to prioritise ending hunger and hardship, and underpinning these calls with effective use of our data, learning and evidence.
Our recent Cost of Hunger and Hardship report shows that, without decisive policy action, an extra 425,000 people will experience hunger and hardship by 2026/27. We know the intrinsic link between deficiencies in the social security system and food bank need, and have become widely recognised publicly as a leading advocacy voice on this topic.
Over the coming years, we’ll continue to build on our success in influencing national and UK governments in the area of social security, capitalising on the success of our flagship joint campaign with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Guarantee our Essentials. Critically, this work combines policy influencing with public influencing, helping reposition the economic and moral case for social security in contemporary society.
Additionally, we will ensure we’re balancing our focus on social security by increasing our evidence and policy recommendations in the area of employment support – with a particular focus on addressing barriers that prevent key demographic groups over-represented at food banks from accessing good, stable work.
Activities to include:
• Continuing our policy development and influencing activity at UK and devolved levels – related to Universal Credit, conditionality regimes, benefits for groups at especially high risk of hunger and hardship (initially disabled people), and employment support, including through our Guarantee our Essentials coalition.
• Animating a series of high-profile engagements, designed to shift public perceptions on social security and build empathy and greater understanding about the role of welfare.
• Strengthening the links between practice and policy by commissioning and developing specialist research and modelling on the impact of specific improvements to social security – and the harms of current deficiencies.
Our ambition statement for 2025-2030
We know that the gap between the basic level of Universal Credit and the cost of everyday essentials is driving high levels of food bank use. We also know that some groups are over-exposed to failures in social security or hindered from accessing employment because of particular characteristics, including disability.
By 2030, we will have influenced policy development and delivery in the social security and employment support areas, with a goal to significantly decrease the number of people experiencing hunger and hardship and needing a food bank’s support.
It’s important to gather evidence of where policies could help reduce food bank need – and campaign for change. Every day, food banks are in touch with people experiencing poverty. While providing support, we also gather evidence of their circumstances.
This helps us look at local drivers of poverty, and share our findings with local and regional policy makers. Because of this, we have been asked by our local council to lead on part of their Anti-Poverty Action Plan.
Karen Mullan Director, Foyle Network Foundation
(Foyle Foodbank)
If we want to bring about a future where nobody needs a food bank to survive, we need to help embolden people’s imagination about what is possible – and inspire others to think about this topic as a key priority for social renewal.
Over the past five years, we’ve increased our footprint and credibility in the public space. We’ve gained support from a wide range of high-profile influencers and brand partners. With over 100,000 mentions of Trussell in the media, 745m social media impressions and 20m visitors to our website, we have regular touchpoints right across UK society.
Now we need to harness these touchpoints by challenging people to prioritise a shared mission to end the need for food banks. For our work with the wider public, this means strengthening the salience of our cause in an ever-changing external environment. And we’ll also focus in on influencing some key sectors and organisations whose choices and priorities are intimately connected with the success of our mission.
Activities to include:
• Creating high-profile events, partnerships and communications that raise public awareness, while increasing engagement with the topic of hunger and hardship.
• Building a team of advocates, who will influence, inspire and work along key sectors (such as the youth sector, the charitable food sector, and
church/faith communities) to help build strategies and initiatives to reduce the need for food banks.
• Continuing to build our case-making research on the topic of hunger and hardship – building a case for why tackling this issue should be a priority for the whole of society.
In a society where the salience of food insecurity is at risk of declining, we will mount high-profile activations, partnerships and campaigns to raise awareness and engagement with the topic of hunger and hardship, while influencing particular sectors of society to play their part in tackling food bank need.
Our aspiration is that, by 2030, we will have ensured that ending food bank need remains a top priority in the public space, and that we have helped shape and implement strategies in key sectors of society to tangibly tackle hunger and hardship.
We want to end the need for food banks – but we can’t do it alone. Other charities, funders, churches, and service providers need to understand why this is so important. We need others to feel the urgency. More local groups need to know what the best ways to tackle hunger and hardship really are. Food charities from all backgrounds need to speak consistently to help key organisations and decision makers focus on the people who come through our doors every day.
Jen Coleman CEO, Black Country Foodbank (Independent)
Over the past five years, we’ve started to understand the impact of sharing our data and stories to influence the design of services and push for longterm policy solutions. Our insight has guided our activities and has helped us to invest in proven pilots, while giving us a powerful voice in making the case for change.
Yet we’re still able to go much further in the area of knowledge transformation.
Our position as a ‘neural network’ spanning over 1,400 communities across the UK, working daily with people experiencing hunger and hardship, offers us unparalleled real-time insight. We want to harness the data, learning, stories and evidence that we gather across all of our activities, combine these with those of partners where possible, and make this more readily available to improve our collective ability to end hunger forever – as civil society, funders, commissioners, policymakers and other decision-makers.
• Improving our ability to share live data with policy makers – as well as private and third sector partners who work alongside us to deliver our mission.
• Strengthening our support for food banks to understand, harness and deploy their data and insights locally to build the case for change.
Our ambition statement for 2025-2030
On average, across the Trussell community, we distribute a food parcel every 11 seconds. Each time we do this, stories are shared, data is captured and lessons are learned. Our service data already helps us to narrate the scale of food bank use, but we want to expand this to provide real-time insights and learnings to empower others, and build the case for lasting change.
Activities to include:
• Ensuring that our collective Trussell knowledge is well-curated – and available in real time, developing a data repository to serve Trussell and food banks, providing validated, quality assured and well visualised data.
By 2028, we aim to have a fully functioning data warehouse which integrates our own food parcel and programme delivery data with government, public service and other charitable data to evidence the most effective solutions to end hunger forever.
We know that data, learning and insights are vital to the work we do here at the food bank. But it’s not just about our work locally. We’re part of a wider community of food banks across the UK, and having greater access to the knowledge that exists in every part of Trussell will be invaluable to us in improving what we do, and advocating for tried-and-tested solutions.
Sam Sudlow Chair of Trustees, Wokingham Foodbank
Together, we can build a future where no one needs a food bank.
This strategy is our roadmap – shaped by lived experience, grounded in evidence, and driven by a belief in the power of community.
But lasting change will only happen if we walk this path together.
Whether you’re a volunteer, supporter, policymaker, partner, or someone with lived experience: your voice, your action, and your commitment matter – and we really hope you’ll join us.
For more information on how you can support our vision of ending hunger Today, Together and Forever – or if you have any questions about specific aspects of the strategy – please contact:
Sophie Carre Director of Public Engagement
sophie.carre@trussell.org.uk
If we secure robust policy influence and strong on-the-ground community support, as well as leveraging our broader programmatic work, we anticipate driving significant change. This integrated approach could reduce food bank need by 25% by the end of this Parliament – and by 50% by the conclusion of the next.
Helen Barnard Trussell’s Director of Policy, Research and Impact
I’m really interested in strategies that take a holistic approach to working alongside people. As such, it’s encouraging and inspiring to see that the next phase of Together for Change has a wide variety of activities which work together to create impact. From the offer of a warm, inclusive welcome, through advice and support, outwards to our communities and influencing policy and society – I know we engage on each of these levels. And support on leadership development, data and evidence and raising support will complement each of these areas.
Simon Hawking CEO, Acts Trust (Lincoln Foodbank)