News

Paul’s Experience as Trustee for Finchley Foodbank

5th November 2025

Introduction

I think it’s true to say we are still the largest Foodbank in Barnet. We are serving somewhere in the region of 200 households a week now, which represents somewhere between 600 and 700 people coming in and using our Foodbank services every week. It’s a Foodbank that works on a trust basis as in that people don’t need a referral or any particular voucher or anything like that to come and use the services. We have probably a couple of thousand people on our books as active clients.

I actually spent most of my career, living and working overseas. I have a house here, but I was traveling to and from it to the airport an awful lot… That sort of stopped for various reasons, just before COVID. So I was not actually particularly engaged with the local community. Like many people who get involved in local organizations, I was in a sort of transition between my working life and whatever my next life will be. And, like many others as well, I suspect:

I was sitting at home during the Pandemic, looking at what’s going on in the community – clearly a time with a lot of need – and thinking this would be a good time to get involved, helping people who are really struggling as a result of all that was going on at that time.

I can’t quite remember to be honest, how I became aware of the Foodbank. I think they were using social media and other local groups to promote themselves. And I started dropping off occasional bits of additional shopping as many people do… Then I asked them if they needed extra help: that was that. It sort of took off from there. So I’ve been engaged and involved with Finchley Foodbank since the middle of 2020.

Finchley Foodbank and its Trustees

Like many organizations, they were really sort of rushing to try and adjust how they worked. I mean, the organization was founded in 2013, and COVID saw a massive increase in demand as people’s lives got upended in all sorts of different ways. Obviously an organization like a Foodbank had to find dramatically different ways of working… Prior to COVID, people would have been invited in for a cup of tea (the organization was actually relatively small at that stage). Clearly, we could no longer be inviting people into the building. However, we were trying to protect clients coming to the Foodbank. So all was changing.

One of the odd experiences I would say I had is that, of course, all of the volunteers were masked and I don’t think I actually saw the bottom half of any of the other volunteers faces for about a year and a half, until we decided it was safe!

It’s an organization that’s been in a constant state of transition, but particularly over the last five years. I think everybody had hoped that once the weirdness and strangeness of COVID died away that, so would the level of demand for foodbank services. But a combination of the cost-of-living crisis in particular, kicked off perhaps by the Ukraine war, actually saw continued increases in demand. There are still a lot of Foodbanks around, as you know, and I think quite a lot of people are surprised in what’s perceived to be a quite affluent borough like Barnet, that the need for Foodbanks is as substantial as it is.

For the first basically ten years of its existence, Finchley Foodbank existed under the umbrella of another charity, and it started off as a very small group operating out of a church hall in East Finchley. We decided 2 or 3 years ago that we actually needed to establish ourselves as a fully independent charity; so that we were completely in command of our own destiny, basically. Which, of course, required us to set up a board of trustees as well.

The initial group of trustees was drawn from among the management group, the people who’d been running the Foodbank for many years. But it was felt that it would be more appropriate if we established a clear distinction between the management group, that really looks after all the nitty gritty detail of running what is quite a large operation, and the trustees group that would fulfil the oversight and the legal requirements and make sure that the day to day management of the organization isn’t getting bogged down in some of the broader governance issues and vice versa.

Originally the person who had been chairing our management group also became the chair of the trustees. And a year and a half ago I was asked – as one of the volunteers – if I would be willing to take over as the chair of the trustees. So we’ve separated the roles. I think there is sometimes a bit of a risk when you have a two-tier governance structure, that you simply rehash the same issues and potentially cause confusion. So we wanted to be very clear what the different roles of the trustees would be.

We’re focused on the core basic roles of trustees of the charity; to make sure that our activities line-up with the objectives of the charity, to make sure that we are fulfilling our legal obligations as a charity and, as an employer, safeguarding for both volunteers and clients. We are acutely conscious that we are dealing with a very vulnerable group of people among our client base. A cross-section of those who find themselves in need across London and across the rest of the country, I’m sure: so everybody does safeguarding training.

There are various tools: the ones we did came through from the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). There are online programs that lead you through the basic duties and responsibilities of trustees… I certainly find that useful.

I’ve been on all sorts of boards over the years: business boards, not-for-profit boards, school Parent Teacher Associations… Everything you could imagine! But, equally, there are some quite specific duties and legal requirements of trustees.

I think it’s important when people take on those roles that they are aware that this isn’t just showing up at an occasional committee meeting. There are actually important duties and we have to make sure that everything is being done appropriately. The Trustee group meets on a quarterly basis, but I am personally in much more regular communication with both the chair of the management group and the Foodbank manager. And I continue as an active volunteer: I show up on Fridays and carry cans of baked beans.

We describe ourselves as an emergency Foodbank, by which we mean that, we are providing up to three days food for a family. The amount of food that people can take varies depending on the size of the household. The vast majority of our clients don’t come all the time. Some of them we see very occasionally, some people only once: the bottom has fallen out of their world for some reason, and they simply can’t afford to feed the family this week.

Others are there on a more regular basis for all sorts of reasons. And we do work with a number of other community groups who can provide support and guidance to people, to try and help them some sort out the financial pressures and problems. We’ve just recently announced a link up with a charity called Power Up North London.

We include quite a lot of signposting: guiding people to community resources that they may not be aware of, or things which would help to support them and perhaps, hopefully get them out of the situation where they need to be coming to the Foodbank to help them feed their families.

Skills as a Trustee

I actually was involved with the global exhibitions and trade fair business, running the trade association for the international exhibitions industry. It was a not-for-profit, but it was a business organization that had members in 85 countries… I didn’t ever get quite to all 85! But it involved an awful lot of travel. And prior to that, I was running a consulting business in the exhibitions and trade industry. I actually spent most of my working life in Hong Kong – I was there for 25 years working in China and the rest of Asia for most of my career.

Through my life, I’d have to say the not-for-profit and volunteering have been amongst the most fulfilling things I’ve done, whether it was coaching kids’ mini-rugby when I was living in Hong Kong to school councils and various think tanks, different things.

I think I have been involved in managing, either running or participating in a very wide variety of boards, not just company boards or business boards, but chambers of commerce, PTA, school councils, all sorts of things like that. And it has actually been useful because I think sometimes if you just bring experience from a government world or business world or whatever, then you can manage varying groups of people!

What it means to me

We have 200 plus volunteers. It is a group of passionate people who are all fantastic. From young people who particularly come for evening sessions where we’re restocking or on Saturdays, which is traditionally been our main client session, to quite a few retired people who want to continue an involvement in the community, through to the management group being involved in setting up how we work. A really interesting, lovely cross-section of people have done a fantastic job over the years.

If you want to join this incredible team as a volunteer or trustee; keep up to date with the latest opportunities here:

The announcement of their partnership with Power Up North London is here: