In this section we aim to introduce people and companies that have become involved in the Cambridge Technopole. Each of them has a story to tell, and we think it's important that others hear that story.
Both in order to know what is happening, and to learn from the experience of others.
We hope you will appreciate and enjoy their contributions.
P.S. Feel free to send us your suggestions for future sessions.
In this Q & A session we feature FoodShare, a Cambridge based charity that is trying to use the web to radically change the way we produce and consume food. Another example of how technology and the web can be applied to social enterprise projects.
Who are the members of your team and what are their responsibilities?
The founding members of the Foodshare project are Mark Desvaux and Dan Spencer. We also have help from a number of people that act as advisors to the Foodshare project. In the technical arena we are starting to work with a developer, Beth who is helping us out with our online presence.
Being quite a young initiative, we have not really defined specific roles for each other. That said, Mark tends to handle the media and the pilot projects that we have running (because they are based in his Village) and Dan handles the online presence and technical tools that we are using to grow the project. We tend to have open conversation sessions with each other to develop potential ideas and to come up with innovative new ways of doing things. This is how we have always worked well together.
We tend to have similar views on a variety of things and both have a great passion for the environment. This is really how Foodshare came about: talking about growing our vegetables at the allotment, and how we were going to become self sufficient in food, when we realised that there was something that could be done with the surplus courgettes that we were harvesting, but not eating (courgettes for every meal gets boring!).
Describe briefly what your software does.
Our "software" is really a website with a number of "applications". The main website itself - foodshare.co.uk - acts as a landing page for people that have heard about Foodshare through one of the various media channels. Foodshare is a real favourite with the press. Interested parties can register on the website, and we will then send them more information about how to get involved: either by growing and donating, setting up a Foodshare in their community/school or for Charities that want to become Foodshare recipients.
When and how did the idea for your software come about?
It was obvious to us that the Foodshare idea was a great opportunity to use the power of the Internet to add mass appeal to a good (offline) idea. The important thing for us is that the project has an online element to help it function better and to be able to spread the idea internationally, but we also like the fact that the project is firmly rooted in the real world.
The idea for Foodshare came about from a conversation about what to do with a glut of courgettes. We set up a collection point ("Donation Station") for surplus veg on Mark's allotment and contacted the Children's hospice in Milton to see if they were interested in some free locally grown goodness. The chef nearly bit our hands off and so we had our first Foodshare recipient. We also developed a method of recording the amount of veg that was being donated, and before we knew it we had donated around £1,000 of fresh food (equivalent supermarket prices) for the hospice. After such a successful first few months, we started thinking about how we could grow the scheme beyond Milton. This is where we knew that the Internet would come into its own.
The idea for the website came soon after when we realised that the pilot project could be rolled out nationally and even internationally. We had seen the success of wikipedia-type sites for documentation of processes, and so our first thoughts were to set up a wiki to describe and document how we setup the project in Milton for others to follow. We then needed a way for new Foodshare projects to be able to form and create community groups with their own information etc. and so we setup a social networking site which served us well in the early days whilst our online requirements were not very specific.
All great ideas need a trigger to kickstart them into action. What was your trigger?
Our trigger was the realisation of the amounts of food that are being wasted by the current global food system, and a belief that we could do something small to help those most in need. Food bills are rising year on year because of the rising price of energy and charities are amongst the hardest hit. We saw an opportunity to help, in some small way at ground level with this problem and we saw the effect that good food has on the wellbeing and recovery of the cared for in local charities. This ultimately spurred us on to make the project bigger and better, to help as many people as possible taste the delights of locally grown food.
Foodshare is very much about creating a community of users with a specific interest. How are you building up your community?
As mentioned above, we are currently developing our community site to allow each Foodshare project to have a home on the internet. However the biggest driver to our growth is through partnerships with other national horticultural and organic bodies and word of mouth through communities, as well as press interest. We have found that school projects are the most successful to get set up, simply because there is an inherent responsibility for schools to educate their pupils about both where our food comes from, but also how we can share and help those in need. Partnering with the RHS school gardening scheme and setting up an online registration process allowed us to sign-up over 30 schools in a few weeks, which means over 5,000 primary school pupils will get to participate in Foodshare this season. We also have over 100 charities already signed up which "foodsharers" can view on an interactive map.
What reaction have you had from the traditional food industry eg supermarkets, farmers?
We're already seeing a lot of support from local food producers, such as farmer's markets, groups campaigning for locally grown, seasonal food, as well as organisations supporting more food education in schools such as Sustain. Over time, we believe Foodshare will become very involved in the big questions and debates we have to face up to about food and our food industry, both nationally and globally. There are some major changes around the corner which will affect us all, and Foodshare wants to be proactive in facing these head-on.
What do you think makes Cambridge special (if anything) for startups like yourselves?
Cambridge has such as broad spectrum of people with different skills and talents which makes it such a hotbed for launching exciting new project such as Foodshare. We are constantly amazed by the people we meet!
What do you think needs to be improved - or is missing - within the Cambridge Technopole, that you would have found of use in your early stages?
It would be great to have a dedicated group of people who donate 10% of their time each week to a not-for profit or charity. Almost like the old model of tithing income, but instead of donating money, you donate time. Ideally these people would be able to take on a project such as Foodshare's technical development, and would have a broad range of skills from coding to design. This is always the bottleneck in any web-based initiative.
What next?
On the web front, we are working on the "Totaliser". Its main function is to facilitate the logging of the donation of food, for us to be able to track and display the success of each Foodshare project. This will form a particularly important part of our schools projects, as the teachers see opportunities for the incorporation of cross-curricular activities such as Mathematics (working with weights, currency etc).
We also have some really cool ideas to do with aggregating each charity's food requirements and matching these to growers.
What would you do differently if you were starting now?
We are currently looking for a very kind philanthropist who would like to help us change the world. (If you know one, please get in contact!). It would have been great to have financial support in place from day one, but we never envisaged the idea taking off quite in the way it has. It's running on it's own momentum and we are hanging onto its coat tails!
In five years time will you have exited and moved on to other projects, or would you like to see the charity grow.
We hope that Foodshare will have spread throughout the UK and the world. We have a very exciting long-term vision.
If you would like to contact FoodShare, here are their details.
Web: www.foodshare.co.uk
Email: info @ foodsharenetwork.org
Twitter: @foodsharers
Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Foodshare