Improving Environmental Performance and Community Engagement for The Trussell Trust

Situation

Following the fundraising and pro-bono support provided to the Trussell Trust during 2019/20, we are pleased to be continuing to support the UK anti-poverty charity by offering our sustainability expertise to enhance its environmental and social impacts.

Widely known for its hugely positive social impact work, the Trussell Trust supports a UK network of food banks to provide emergency food to people locked in poverty, whilst campaigning for change to end the need for food banks. Between 1 April 2020 and 31 March 2021, food banks in the Trussell Trust’s UK wide network distributed 2.5 million emergency food parcels to people in crisis, a 33% increase on the previous year. 980,000 of these went to children.

Solution

The Trussell Trust’s ambition was to deepen its positive impact in the environmental sphere and to actively drive environmental initiatives throughout its operations. To support these goals, Anthesis partnered with the Trussell Trust to develop an Environmental Policy and Plan outlining the charity’s commitment to managing and improving its environmental impact.

Anthesis experts actively engaged with key stakeholders from across the Trussell Trust network to gain an in-depth understanding of how the organisation operates, to understand its values and needs, to identify where it is already creating positive environmental impact and where it could make further positive changes in the sustainability space.

In addition to the Environmental Policy and Plan, we are pleased to have supported the Trussell Trust in developing a Modern Slavery Policy and Statement. This project involved:

• Engaging with key stakeholders and a practice review to assess what processes had already been established to address issues of Modern Slavery.
• A supplier risk analysis was conducted based on procurement spend data to identify which suppliers and what categories of spend were higher risk for Modern Slavery, and where The Trussell Trust had to take more proactive measures to manage these risks.
• Finally, we developed a Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking Statement, and provided an action plan for how the charity could implement this policy across their practises, suppliers and high spend donors. This statement will need to be updated yearly and will contribute to a more robust governance structure moving forward.

Impact

As part of our global corporate responsibility programme at Anthesis, we are committed to supporting charities and organisations that align with our pledges as a B Corp organisation and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that we have chosen to focus on for employee and community engagement. Working with the Trussell Trust directly contributed to supporting SDG2 Zero Hunger, which was our particular focus over 2019/20. We’re proud to share our success and global achievements from this period – see the summary below:

We are delighted to announce that for 2021-2023, our employees have voted to focus community engagement efforts on SDG13 Climate Action, which goes hand in hand with Anthesis’ ambitions to activate sustainable performance and move the dial between now and 2030, a critical period of time that the UN describes as the ‘decisive decade’ due to the bold action needed to reduce global warming.

The Trussell Trust’s new approach to environmental and human rights policy implementation will provide a solid foundation for the charity to accelerate its environmental performance and engage with suppliers on modern slavery and human trafficking risks.