The charity does food across three council areas, Renfrewshire, Glasgow and North Lanarkshire. 

Established July 17th 2018 and ran a year before that as a few people moving food around to people in need. 

It's a volunteer run charity and does not aim for loads of money to do its work. It's a goodwill group all looking to help folk without going through complicated forms and mechanisms that put folk off using the services. 

 

The charity connects and is open to all members of society, whether a business director and the charity knows many, all the way through to folk that need immediate assistance. Eat Up started with food and has evolved to give people furniture and there's help for music artists trying to break into the music scene. There's also support for entrepreneurs. 

 

Eat Up works alongside another 25 charities and community groups, mostly with food and occasionally helping the smaller charities with storage space and office space. 

It works well and those charities reach out to areas further than Eat Up does and if Eat Up has food items, say, the other charities can get them to folk using their infrastructure. It just makes sense to work together like that. The pandemic taught the charity that, and last Christmas, Eat Up joined with Morrisons to move 3000 Christmas dinners which the charity contacted eight other groups about to help move across three council areas. https://www.eatupcharity.co.uk/morrisons

 

A normal day at Eat Up is to make sure the van has enough fuel for the day. Recently the charity has managed to put around 300 plus miles in the tank and its really helped maintain the movement with the van. Sometimes it can be down to the reserve fuel tank and we just keep going the best we can. Once it stalled on a food collection and the driver had to get someone to get enough fuel to then get the van to a fuel station. The first van was bought with a lottery grant. 9100 it was a critical item as food was being moved by bikes and trailers before. You can see in this pdf: https://www.eatupcharity.co.uk/costoflivingfund

Martin Lewis, Robertson Trust and others helped with money for food. Eat Up filled its warehouse up and got a food distribution centre going. The charity learned as it went and became good at the flow of things. 

 

The charity found a new mechanism to put vast quantities of food out. 10000 pounds a week of donated food and some bought went out. Catering items to make pizza and pasta in cafés and in commercial kitchens across Glasgow and Renfrewshire. The food delivered once cooked to homeless shelters and people stuck with no food in their houses. 

Unusual times and yet people worked together and community really came to life. It was an inspiring wake up call for all.