How this Edinburgh organisation is tackling food poverty, including providing 1m Covid meals

“It should be around that multisensory journey of discovery with food, it's not just about being hungry.”

Brenda Black is the chief executive of charity and social enterprise Edinburgh Community Food (ECF), which has been going for nearly three decades, and says its aim is “helping people get into healthy food, and healthy food into people”.

Key aspects of such a remit include tackling health inequalities in low-income communities in the Scottish capital, including cooking and nutrition courses (“we're not a food bank, we have never been a food bank,”), and delivering fruit and veg boxes to customers including businesses, with profits reinvested in the organisation.

Black took the CEO reins in 2019, coming after she started her career young, working for her family’s butcher shops and grocers, which included serving the “food deserts of Glasgow, so I started where I've returned to [at ECF], in many ways”.

Her current role enables her to drive forward her “bold” aim to “do something that would change the health of Scotland” after seeing close-up Glasgow’s relatively low life expectancy, and she is a founding director of Glasgow Community Food Network.

Part of such a plan before ECF included her becoming a Healthcare Professions Council-registered dietitian, and doing volunteering to help the homeless, which showed her the good work many people were doing.

She became a board member of ECF, taking the CEO role when it became vacant, only to soon be flung into the unprecedented demands of the pandemic. But the crisis also showed what the organisation was capable of achieving.

It went from providing about 120 food boxes a week for families to 1,200, with the same size of team. “And I have never encountered that [kind of effort] in any other business that I've ever been in … It was astonishing to be a part of that,” says Black. Working with 35 partnership organisations across Edinburgh, ECF says it provided just under a million meals – about 70 per cent of the city’s response – during the period, which included re-routing food that would normally be bought by the hospitality sector.

Brenda Black is CEO of ECF that says its aim is 'helping people get into healthy food, and healthy food into people'. Picture: contributed.

Food poverty has taken an increasingly centre-stage role in recent years amid soaring food inflation, and food banks in the Trussell Trust network in Scotland provided 86,000 emergency food parcels for children in 2023/24, up by a fifth from 2018/19. Furthermore, a key priority for Black is supporting young mothers for the crucial first 1,000 days of a child’s life, which she says can have multigenerational benefits. ECF is a member of the Glasgow-based The Poverty Alliance, which has noted that a quarter of Scottish children live in poverty.

Black was in fact recently awarded a Churchill Fellowship enabling her to travel to Canada, Switzerland and Italy, as well as online exploration of Colombia, to research how they approach improving health outcomes for food-insecure young mothers and children. “I hope I can bring things back to the communities that we work with, and influence policy,” says the CEO, who also sits on the Scottish Government’s food network and advisory boards.

She is keen to take a holistic approach and apply earlier intervention to support those in need, for example helping them with skills in saving money when shopping for groceries, and maximising ingredients when cooking. She also favours the “cash first” approach put forward by the Scottish Government to let people on the breadline buy their own food, with more “choice, dignity, and compassion” than using a food bank.

ECF works with organisations such as supermarkets, and trade body The Food & Drink Federation Scotland, while last year Morrison Construction provided a £12,000 donation to buy a food education vehicle. And it is open to working with more businesses and strengthen its community connections.

The organisation's offering includes courses in cooking and nutrition, and delivering fruit and veg boxes to customers including businesses. Picture: contributed.

The organisation’s logo is a strawberry, and Black says strawberry plants are runner plants, so they sprout new independent offshoot plants. “And that's what we want to do,” referring to growing other community food organisations in Scotland and the UK.

It wants to help other communities and organisations “not to go through the growing pains that we might have gone through over the last 28 years, but to actually use the structures and our learnings, especially around how we manage risk in this environment”.

She also wants to see community organisations recognised as offering a path to developing and growing a sustainable career that's recognised in industry. “When I worked in industry, it was competitive, but in a community setting you spend your time sharing, collaborating, co designing. And I think that doing more of that in business can only be positive for the people in the communities we serve.”

According to the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO), the Scottish voluntary sector is made up of more than 46,500 organisations that contribute to the well-being of people and communities. The SCVO also found that just over half of relevant organisations polled in November 2023 said they thought they had fully delivered their planned programmes and services since the spring of last year, while the top challenge cited by respondents was rising costs.

Black says costs as well as nutrition and health are among the serious aspects of food, a sector that is ECF’s bread and butter, but “fundamentally, it should be about fun, hope”. She adds: “It should be around that multisensory journey of discovery with food, where you eat and you taste the flavours of the season, and you know, it's not just about being hungry… a lot of people that just never get the chance to do that. And [changing that] is really what we want to do.”