Iseult Ward

And it was actually a charity who said it to me in our very early days that I said, you know, would you sign up to get the surplus food?

And they said, look, we love what you're doing and we love the idea.

But honestly, one of my fears is that you'll set up, you'll run it for a year, we'll become reliant on you and then you'll be gone and I'll be left with a hole in my budget, which will be very difficult to recover from.

And he said, that's one of the reasons I'm reluctant to get involved right now.

And it did make us realize at a very early stage, the responsibility that we were taking on, that if we did this, we had to do it in a way that was

financially sustainable and responsible, we had to approach growth in a way that was more probably risk averse than a commercial entity would because we couldn't grow the organization if it put any of our existing work in any way in risk.

So that mindset, I think, was always really important.

And one of the great things about a social enterprise model is it does mitigate that risk around financial sustainability because a lot of organizations that are 90% grant funded or 90% philanthropy funded,

And if there's any shock or if they lose a funder, that can put the organization under serious pressure and often results in cutting back on the impact that you're delivering.

So for us, having a diversified mix of income streams has always been something that we've been focused on.

And we say, you know, the income that

We generate that really fuels our operations.

And then it's that allows us to focus the grants and the philanthropy that we get on growth and innovation.

And we do believe it makes a better proposition for everyone.

The businesses that we work with benefit from a much greater social impact working with us versus a commercial entity.

And the people who are kind enough to donate philanthropically or corporate partners or through grants, they benefit from the fact that they're supporting a much more resilient organization because of that mix of income.

So we do really see that that is an important part of how we work.

And it is something that you do need to constantly kind of come back to and focus on.

It's a good time to start something.

We always kind of joked in our early days that, you know, because I went from being a student to like a start-up social enterprise, I went from having very little money to having very little money.