From food bank to Deliveroo overnight

On Friday I drove out of London and down an eerily deserted M23 to Brighton.

I was on this journey to meet one of the teams we are supporting at the Brighton Unemployed Centre Families Project, and my objective was to provide them with their first “donated” car from Karshare. It’s about two hours to Brighton from where I live in south London, but I didn’t realise how much of a trip it would turn out to be.

Let me give you a bit of context. My name is Andy Hibbert and was the Founder and CEO of Car & Away. We’ve been running a new but fast-growing sharing business for the last two and a half years based at several airports around the UK.

Our model was simple. Outbound holiday makers could drop their cars with us at, for example, Gatwick Airport. We would clean them, test them for roadworthiness and insure them for inbound travellers who wanted to rent a car. When the owner returned from holiday, their car would be there waiting for them, freshly cleaned, and accompanied by a healthy deposit in their bank account for the rental income their car had earned while they were away.

The business was growing well. We had engaged with 7 additional airports across the UK and 17 across Europe and were planning the launch of a new sharing proposition from home this Spring.

And then Covid-19 arrived, and closed all the airports, and suspended our operations overnight until further notice.

Like many businesses, the extent of the Covid-19 impact was largely out of our control. We did, however, have control over our response. Given the capability and the partnerships we had in place, and inspired by the magnificent response of the whole nation, we decided that we too could help.

So, we put word out to the local community of Bristol that if they would donate their car for a week or so, we would find a member of the NHS, a charity worker or a foodbank that would put it to good use. Already operating at Bristol airport meant Bristol was an area we knew well.

We christened this new scheme the Karshare community initiative and built a quick simple website karshare.com to outline what we wanted to do and who we were working with to make it happen.

The response was dramatic. The average car in the UK is already un-used 94% of the time, and at a time like this, with most of the country under lockdown, that number will be even higher. People came forward in increasingly greater numbers with generous donations of cars for essential workers and services on a voluntary basis. We even had an open-ended donation of a car ‘given to us’ to help the cause.

So, the trickle of donated cars become a flood and Bristol spread to Brighton and then London Nightingale, and now Manchester. Four weeks in and we have had over 475 cars donated to us for good use, and the number is growing faster and faster.

All of which takes us to my trip to the Brighton Unemployed Centre Families Project.

Over the phone, Alex from the project had told me that the centre had been under severe strain since the lockdown, and that they were having to re-invent themselves and adapt to the difficult circumstances they found themselves in.

Arriving at the centre, a modest building in Brighton, perched on a hill with a tremendous view of the sea, I saw immediately what Alex had meant. This was my first trip to a food bank, but I hadn’t realised quite how important a feature they have become in the lives of so many people in their community.

The first and biggest difference was that the doors were now locked. For an organisation that prides itself on being open all hours, and actively welcomes members of the community across its hearth for solace, refuge, education, entertainment and a good meal, a lockdown is the worst case scenario.

What astounded me was how Alex and her team had turned her organisation upside down over a matter of days, from a customer destination to an essential distribution company. Having run private sector businesses for over fifteen years now and helped teams transform themselves through challenging times, that this was a business transformation that astounded me.

Up on the second floor, a full-scale kitchen production unit had been set up under the watchful gaze of volunteer George, a professional chef with years of experience. He and his team set up the facility overnight, preparing and creating food that would go into the food parcels to be sent to clients. Everything was being meticulously cleaned and sanitised, labelled and assembled with immaculate care and precision by their amazing resident cleaner Monica. In the world of allergies and intolerances, precision is paramount when it comes to food labelling and distribution.

From there, the food drops would begin their journey to a sizeable catchment area, seventy parcels each and every day, out to Brighton, Hove, Peacehaven, Portslade and Hollingbury. At this time, they are receiving an additional 20 requests per day and I can only imagine as the financial hardships grow, these requests will increase.