Love Food Hate Waste in London: A Summary of Volunteer Coordinator
Activity
1. Introduction
In 2012/13, Recycle for London delivered a London wide Love Food Hate Waste Campaign (LFHW).
Campaign activities occurred across three levels:
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Nationally – in line with the national campaign calendar
London-wide – awareness raising activity, advertising and PR
Local activity – focused on community engagement
This approach was designed to capitalise on national activity, raise awareness of the issue, and to
provide consumers with the skills and practical information needed to change behaviour.
Based on evidence from the WRAP report “Evaluating the impact of WRAP’s cascade training
programme in England 2011-12”1, Recycle for London engaged Greater London Volunteering (GLV)
to coordinate the recruitment and training of Food Waste Champions in local communities across
London. Greater London Volunteering represents a network of volunteering centres in London and
was able to sub-contract this project to 9 volunteer centres, spread geographically throughout the
city.
The aim of training Food Waste Champions was to encourage messages about food waste
prevention to be cascaded to the wider community. The London campaign, focused on the core
message “You could save up to £50 per month by throwing away less food”, and the volunteer
coordinator activity supported this by focusing on the personal financial benefits that individuals
could achieve through changed behaviour.
GLV and the volunteer centres have excellent relationships with community groups and are trusted
sources of information. Using such an organisation enabled the campaign to reach sectors of the
community that are usually difficult for Boroughs to engage. Fully trained Food Waste Champions
were encouraged, as a minimum, to tell friends and family about how they could save money by
wasting less food, and to think about how they could cascade messages to a wider audience.
2. Objectives
The objectives of the volunteer coordinator activity were as follows:
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To recruit and train 2,171 Food Waste Champions
To generate 25,285 hours of volunteering time
To hold 251 events to promote Love Food Hate Waste and recruit potential Food Waste
Champions and 2 celebration events for Food Waste Champions.
Evaluating the impact of WRAP’s cascade training programme in England 2011-12, July 2012
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To engage120 new community groups in Love Food Hate Waste and to retain the
engagement of 109 community groups already supporting the campaign
23,180 people directly engaged in Love Food Hate Waste by the volunteer coordinators,
engaged community groups and Food Waste Champions.
To generate 65 PR opportunities about LFHW and volunteering as a Food Waste Champion
To generate 100 tweets about the project
To generate 10,000 email addresses for the national LFHW newsletter.
3. Timescales
Initially the programme had been intended to run for a minimum of six months. Due to several
delays in launching the London wide LFHW activity, the Volunteer Coordinator work began in
November 2012 and ran until the end of March 2013. Training of the Volunteer Coordinators took
place in mid-November, meaning that the programme was delivered over a 4 month period.
4. Cost
Recycle for London invested a total of £146,527 in the volunteer coordinator programme.
This included costs for the recruitment and training of Food Waste Champions, and costs for the
provision of engagement tools (such as trainer packs, leaflets, spaghetti measures). Engagement
tools were distributed by the volunteer coordinators as necessary and used to engage consumers at
events run by both the volunteer coordinators and the Food Waste Champions.
5. Volunteer Recruitment and Activity
GLV sub-contracted with nine volunteer centres, with each providing a part time Volunteer
Coordinator responsible for recruitment, training and on-going management of Food Waste
Champions.
Where possible, Boroughs were grouped by Waste
Disposal Authority (WDA). Where more than one
volunteer coordinator was operating across a
WDA area, one Volunteer Coordinator took the
lead as the key contact for the authority.
Engagement with Boroughs was vital in ensuring
that the Volunteer Coordinator project was a
success. In many cases, Boroughs were also
working to deliver community engagement activity
so it was essential to take a coordinated approach.
Figure 1: Groups of Boroughs covered by individual Volunteer
Coordinators
Each Volunteer Coordinator attended a LFHW training session organised by WRAP’s Local
Partnership Advisors to ensure that they fully understood the campaign, their role and were capable
of delivering cascade training to Food Waste Champions. Two Local Partnership Advisers were
available throughout the project to provide support to the Volunteer Coordinators.
Volunteer Coordinators used their existing networks to identify opportunities to recruit community
groups and individuals to attend LFHW training. They also identified local opportunities to promote
LFHW and the champion training, such as attending local events.
The volunteer coordinators were able to offer flexible training sessions that suited the needs of the
groups being trained. The training sessions ranged from the full three hour cascade training, to a
shorter hour long session. In all training sessions, Food Waste Champions were encouraged to
explore options for cascading messages to the wider community. Food Waste Champions can be
classified by the “level” of activity delivered within the local community. The levels and the types of
activity that could be delivered by each Food Waste Champion include:
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Level One – pass on tips and advice to family, friends, neighbours and colleagues.
Level Two – Level one, plus putting up posters, including articles in local newsletters,
including a link on the intranet at work.
Level Three – Level one and two, plus giving a talk or mini workshop to personal groups such
as PTA members, church meetings, colleagues at work.
Level Four – Levels one, two and three, plus attending local events such as school fairs, local
shows, food fairs and providing training to others.
6. Monitoring
GLV completed a monitoring report on a monthly basis which provided detailed information against
a range of key performance indicators, including:
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The number of people spoken to
The number of Champions trained
The number of community groups engaged
The number of events attended
The number of PR opportunities and social media measures generated
We were unable to monitor the number of people that signed up to the national LFHW newsletter or
the number of people visiting Lovefoodhatewaste.com as a result of being engaged in the Volunteer
Coordinator activity.
Each month, Food Waste Champions were asked to complete an individual monitoring report
outlining the activities that they had undertaken locally and the number of people they had directly
cascaded messages to.
7. Results
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2937 people were trained as Food Waste Champions (766 more than the target for the
project
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401 new community groups were engaged in LFHW (281 more that the target), and 20
groups who had already been engaged were retained within the project. The number of
existing groups retained was significantly lower than the target because GLV found that they
were enable to engage with a broader range of community groups that would not
necessarily have been approached or engaged by Local Authorities in the past, hence the
considerably higher than predicted number of new groups engaged.
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193 events were attended by the Volunteer Coordinators. This was less than the target of
251, but generated significantly more than expected numbers of Champions for trained.
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68 PR opportunities were generated, including one television opportunity where a Food
Waste Champion was interviewed on ITN’s London Tonight programme.
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126 Social Media measures were generated through Twitter and Facebook.
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100 individual monitoring reports were submitted by 90 Food Waste Champions, showing
that:
- 2516 cascades were made to local communities (an average of 28 cascades per Food
Waste Champion).
- 748.5 volunteer hours were generated (an average of 8 volunteer hours per Food
Waste Champion).
 Assuming non-reportees achieved on average half the number of cascades compared to
reportees, we can estimate that Food Waste Champions cascaded LFHW messages to 39,795
people within their local communities.
 Assuming non-reportees generated half the number of volunteer hours as reportees, we can
estimate that Food Waste Champions generated a total of 11,839 volunteer hours. Using the
Volunteering England formula2 for calculating the economic value of volunteering, and the
average hourly wage for London of £15.673, we can estimate that Food Waste Champion
activity has an economic value of £185,514.
 It cost Recycle for London:
2
http://www.volunteering.org.uk/component/gpb/is-there-any-way-of-measuring-the-economic-value-of-the-work-ourvolunteers-are-doing
Formula: number of volunteers X average hours worked X average hourly rate
3 http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/re-reference-tables.html?edition=tcm%3A77-235202; (ASHE 2011 (provisional,
based on SOC 2000) Table 25 - Region by Public and Private Sector
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£49.89 to train each Food Waste Champion
£3.68 per cascade into the local community
8. Successes
Despite delivering the project over a condensed period of time, GLV were able to train a significant
number of Food Waste Champions, exceeding the objective for the project. GLV were effective in
encouraging Champions to cascade messages within local communities, again, significantly
exceeding this objective.
WRAP and GLV worked very collaboratively on the project, building a good relationship. WRAP
provided support, knowledge and advice about LFHW, while empowering GLV, as a trusted
community based organisation, to build on their excellent relationships with community groups. This
approach enabled GLV to reach more people than anticipated, and meant that GLV were willing to
be flexible and to provide support to other partners involved in project delivery.
WRAP were able to provide additional support to GLV to help them build relationships with
Boroughs and Waste Disposal Authorities. The vast majority of the Boroughs were very supportive of
the project, although in some cases there was confusion amongst community groups who had been
contacted by both the Borough and a volunteer centre.
The Volunteer Coordinators were trained to a high standard by the Local Partnership Advisers, which
enabled them to deliver high quality training sessions to Food Waste Champions. The ability to adapt
training session to suit the community groups being trained was important and helped to keep
groups engaged. High quality training materials also helped to ensure that the Volunteer
Coordinators could deliver the best quality training possible.
Food Waste Champions were keen to get involved with activities at both a local and London wide
level to support the campaign. A great level of enthusiasm was displayed by the Food Waste
Champions and they provided great support at a number of events, passing messages on to a people
in attendance for example at the Food Cycle Feaster Banquet.
9. Lesson’s Learnt
The London wide LFHW campaign struggled to achieve buy in from London’s media. The delivery
team at GLV was able to capitalise on one television opportunity to promote the Food Waste
Champion training, but was unable to convert other media leads into PR due to lack of expertise.
More integrated PR support provided by WRAP and the Recycle for London team would have
benefited GLV and enabled the project to effectively take advantage of PR opportunities.
The timescales for the Volunteer Coordinator project were reduced from 6 months of delivery to 4
months. This was due to a combination of factors, including delays in getting the contracts sent out
to GLV. This approach meant that the first 6-8 weeks of the project focused on recruitment, while
the last 8 weeks focused on delivery. There were a number of community groups who expressed an
interest in training at the end of March, and while these were offered the opportunity to be trained
by Borough Officers or WRAPs Local Partnership Advisers, many declined the opportunity as they did
not have a relationship with these organisations. GLV delivered a small number of training sessions
in the last week of March, after the contract for the project had expired, to ensure that community
groups did not feel let down.
Due to the focus on delivering in such a short period of time, the legacy of the project was not
considered fully. It would have been useful to include legacy in the project targets to ensure that it
be given appropriate consideration. It may have been helpful to consider co-delivery of training
sessions in the later stages of the project to raise the reputations of the Boroughs and WRAP with
local communities to ensure that groups were more willing for contact details to be passed on at the
end of the project.
WRAP provided GLV with a list of “warm contacts” at the start of the project. These contacts were
individuals or groups that had previously contacted WRAP to express an interest in LFHW.
Unfortunately on several occasions there was some disconnect between what had been provided
and the level of interest actually displayed by the group when contacted.
While the majority of Boroughs were very supportive of the Volunteer Coordinator activity, one
Waste Disposal Authority felt that they had not been consulted or informed about the project in
enough detail. There was some concern over duplication of activity as Officers at the Authority were
also working to engage local community groups. In this case, WRAP and GLV worked closely with the
waste disposal authority to identify key roles and responsibilities and to ensure that activity was
coordinated. Stakeholder engagement is key to ensuring the successful delivery of such projects, and
there was a delay between initial stakeholder engagement and project delivery which contributed to
confusion about the project.
WRAP procured a large number of engagement resources to support the project, which were
delivered at 2 points throughout the project. The first batch was delivered just after the start of the
project, which caused problems for some Volunteer Coordinators. The batch was also bulk delivered
to one address meaning that couriers had to be utilised to distribute resources to the nine volunteer
centres. The second batch of resources did not arrive until the last 2 weeks of the project, which
meant that they were not able to be distributed in the most effective way.
The Volunteer Coordinators found that some resources were much more popular with communities
than others. In particular, the Food Lover Faces “tip cards” and Recycle for London donated bottle
stops were unpopular. Some of the design concepts for LFHW were not always understood at face
value by certain community groups. It was generally felt by the Volunteer Coordinators and such
groups that the concepts were not inclusive for all ethnic groups in London. However, during training
sessions, community groups clearly understood the key messages, how the campaign related to
them and how they could help their local communities to make the most out of food and save
money.
10. Legacy
The project was designed to ensure that Food Waste Champions had on-going support to help keep
them engaged with the national LFHW campaign. Food Waste Champions were encouraged to sign
up to the national newsletter to ensure that they are kept up to date with new information. All
trained Food Waste Champions have the information and skills to continue cascading messages and
it is hoped that they will continue to do so with their immediate social groups.
Recruitment of Food Waste Champions ended with the end of the contract with GLV. 77 Food Waste
Champions have expressed an interest in continuing to be actively involved with supporting LFHW.
WRAP’s Local Partnership Adviser will provide ongoing support to the Food Waste Champions and
liaising with Boroughs to find suitable volunteering opportunities.
Any community group who has contacted GLV at the end of the project is being offered the
opportunity to receive training from WRAP’s Local Partnership Adviser or from their Local Borough.