Enabling growth through specialist expertise

FEAST With Us is a North London-based nutrition charity creating warm, welcoming spaces where people experiencing food insecurity can access healthy meals and community support. Alongside its community meal services, FEAST also delivers its Healthy Eating on a Budget programme, helping people build the knowledge and confidence to meet their nutritional needs independently.

Like many growing charities, FEAST operates with a small team supporting increasing demand. While volunteers play a vital role on the frontline, the organisation needed additional expertise behind the scenes - from marketing and fundraising to data and operations - to strengthen its long-term capacity. That’s where Reach has become an essential partner.

Here Eleanor Butterworth, Volunteer & Community Partnerships Coordinator, shares their experience:

“We’re a small team working across multiple boroughs, and while our frontline volunteers are essential, it’s the behind-the-scenes work that really enables us to grow. Through Reach, we’ve been able to connect with people who bring specialist expertise into areas we simply wouldn’t have the resource to build internally - things like marketing, communications, fundraising, IT and impact reporting.

“Reach is always the first place we go when we need that kind of support. There are other platforms, but they don’t offer the same depth or consistency. With Reach, we know the people coming forward have the experience and the motivation to make a meaningful contribution, and that makes a huge difference when you’re a small team trying to prioritise your time.

“The impact has been significant. It’s meant we effectively have a marketing function, which we wouldn’t have otherwise. From managing social media to producing newsletters and strengthening our impact reporting, these contributions have helped us communicate our work more clearly and reach more people.

“What that really does is free up our internal team to focus on delivering our services. Demand for what we do is always growing, and being able to spend more time on operations, whether that’s running our community meals, or developing our programmes, is critical. The support we’ve had through Reach has given us that capacity.

“It’s also about flexibility. People can contribute their skills in a way that fits around their lives. That might be spending an hour in the evening or a weekend supporting a specific project. This opens up opportunities to people from all over the country, not just locally, and brings a really diverse range of perspectives and experience into our organisation.

“More recently, when we’ve faced challenges like staff changes or gaps in specific areas, Reach has allowed us to respond quickly. Instead of needing to recruit and onboard new staff, we’ve been able to bring in people quickly with the right expertise to support key projects or functions. That’s been incredibly valuable at a time when resources are tight.

“Without Reach, there would be a real gap. Other platforms are great for more general volunteering, but when it comes to finding people with the right expertise to strengthen how we operate as a charity, Reach is the only place we’ve consistently been able to do that. It’s now become a key part of how we build and sustain our organisation.

“Through Reach, FEAST is not just filling roles, it’s building long-term capability. By connecting with people who bring specialist expertise, the charity can strengthen its foundations, respond to change, and focus more of its energy where it matters most: supporting communities.”