Iseult Ward

Oh, I'm delighted to be here.

Thank you.

I was a student in Trinity at the time, as you said, and I was studying business and economics.

And I really enjoyed the degree I was doing.

And then it was just before coming into third year that I started reading about the concept of social enterprise.

And this really appealed to me, being able to apply what I'd been learning about business and economics, but in a setting where you're prioritizing social and environmental impact.

And serendipitously, I'll say, then there was an event organized for students to go along to under this organization called Enactus to learn more about social enterprise.

So I decided to go along to this and it was at that event that I met Even and she pitched...

This idea around surplus food redistribution, she'd been working in London and had seen across the UK initiatives focused on this idea where you rescue surplus food.

So food that is excess, still perfectly good food, but is destined to go to waste.

You rescue that and you redistribute it into communities.

She came back to Ireland to do Masters in Environmental Science in Trinity and saw that there was no similar solution in Ireland at the time.

So she pitched this idea and I still remember sitting there listening to this going, I think my favourite things have all just come together in this moment.

Food, social impact, the things that I'm learning about as part of my degree.

And I knew immediately that it was something that I wanted to get involved in.

So

from that moment then yeah we started working on it together there were it started off as kind of a student project with lots of different people involved up until we kind of got the first donation and then once I was graduating and she was graduating we had to make a decision and you know were we willing to take the risk and the leap forward to commit ourselves to this rather than going down the traditional route of applying for jobs and yeah we both decided that we would and we'd

probably give it a few months and see how it went and that was um yeah 12 13 years ago

You know, if there was an easy answer, there would be an easy solution, I believe.

So it is quite complex.