A life more local: how Covid-19 made us care more about community

The lasting memory of lockdown won't be empty supermarket shelves but collective kindness in our communities, and to the planet, says OLIO co- founder and CEO Tessa Clarke

The coronavirus outbreak has in many ways been an accelerant of trends that were already building. In particular, we’ve seen that there’s been a significant awakening to both the value of food, and the power of community, as neighbourhoods across the UK have been working together to ensure that vulnerable members of our community can access both.

As lockdown was anticipated, fear drove many to over-purchase and hoard food, whilst images of bare supermarket shelves exacerbated our panic. Many feared that corona virus was bringing out the worst in us, revealing a fragile broken society. Ultimately however, the story that will transcend is one of sharing and caring for others - as saccharine as that may sound.

OLIO is best known for its progress in reducing food waste by connecting people to give away surplus food to their neighbours. Since launch, users have shared 5 million portions of food. The environmental impact of this is equivalent to taking 14 million car miles off the road and has resulted in the saving of over 700 million litres of water in terms of food production.

We’ve reached a major milestone of over 2 million members during lockdown, and three-quarters of those are based in the UK. The volume of food saved has doubled during this period, and individual listings have jumped by 35%, demonstrating that we’re increasingly embracing a life more local.

We absolutely knew there was a desire in our community to take this sharing ethos further - to ease the burden on communities, and so we worked with our members to create campaigns that could make a difference - and quickly.

We launched #Cook4Kids in March, to help feed the 1.3 million vulnerable children in the UK who were missing out on school meals as a result of the school closures. Celebrity chefs James Martin, Melissa Hemsley and Thomasina Miers backed our campaign and shared easy-to-follow recipes so families could get involved. All that was needed was for families to prepare a meal or make an extra portion, upload a photo and organise a no-contact pick-up to support a local family.

More than 7,500 meals have been provided so far thanks to the #Cook4Kids initiative, and it’s one that we hope will continue past lockdown, giving people more options through kindness. We then launched #Cook4Carers in April, so that after a gruelling shift at the hospital, the last thing hard-working front-line NHS staff would have to do is cook.

Our campaign was backed by the NHS, and our community has risen to the task, with more than 7,000 meals donated so far. Whether specially-made, using up leftovers or creating an extra serving, photos are uploaded to the app so that NHS staff could pick up the dish on their way to or from their shift.

For so many of us, not being able to contribute to the national effort beyond adhering to social distancing rules and staying home, has had a profound effect. Contributing in some way by giving back simultaneously does away with that feeling of inertia, whilst also providing a huge injection of empowerment, which is so valuable to our individual and collective mental health.

What we do next will be led by our community of OLIOers, but I know there will be more we can contribute, and that this is the beginning, not the end of a movement with humanity and compassion at its core.

You can download the OLIO app here, and sign up to the #Cook4Carers and #Cook4Kids campaigns once set up online.