Iseult Ward

So there's a balance between the amount of philanthropic kind of grant income that we rely on.

And also we have some commercial income streams.

So.

When we started Food Cloud, we did consider the two different routes available for us and going registering as a commercial entity or going down the route of registering as a non-profit.

The social enterprise wasn't really a legally established entity in Ireland, so it was really one or the other.

But we knew we always wanted to have the, we always wanted to be a social enterprise.

So we always wanted to have a mixed income model.

And we felt that that was very important.

And then the next question really was which legal route would best support our mission, our vision that we wanted as founders and also enable that mixed income model.

And

At the time, and still to this day, going down the route of registering as a charity is really what made the most sense for us.

We were very driven by the impact.

We both like even did accounting and law before she did environmental science.

So, you know, we both had an education in business and we've understood and felt strongly about the benefits of bringing that into how we run Food Cloud and how we set up Food Cloud.

But ultimately, we wanted to make sure that the impact that we were focused on and the mission and vision of the organization were very strongly enshrined in how we worked.

And that was something that being registered as a charity really enabled.

When we were setting up

The most important thing for us was making sure that we could have a really strong network of community partners who benefited from the solution.

They're all non-profit organizations.

They're all charities.