369 Foundation Joins Help2Fund

Hot meals, delivered to the people everyone else has already lost track of. That is what 369 Foundation does, and they are the newest charity to join Help2Fund.

Who they are

369 Foundation is a London charity that cooks and delivers hot, nutritious meals and food parcels to people in serious hardship. The important word in that sentence is delivers.

Most food support in this country works on the assumption that the person in need will come and get it. They will find the food bank, get a referral voucher, arrange transport, and turn up during opening hours. For a lot of people that assumption holds. For the people 369 Foundation works with, it very often does not.

Where the food actually goes

They deliver directly into young people's hostels, mother and baby units, accommodation for ex-offenders, and supported housing for people recovering from substance misuse. These are places where residents are often newly arrived, have no money until a benefit payment clears, have no cooking facilities worth the name, and in some cases have very good reasons for not wanting to queue in public for food.

Delivering into those settings removes almost every barrier at once. Nobody has to explain themselves, nobody has to travel, and nobody has to be seen. The charity is deliberate about this: their language is about supporting people with dignity, and in practice dignity here means not making someone prove how badly they are doing before they get fed.

The part that comes after the meal

Alongside the deliveries, 369 Foundation runs food education and budgeting workshops. The logic is simple enough: getting someone through this week matters a good deal less if nothing has changed by next month.

The workshops cover cooking well on very little, making a food budget stretch, building healthier habits, and managing household finances with some confidence. None of it is glamorous and none of it makes for a dramatic photograph, but it is the difference between a charity that manages a crisis indefinitely and one that occasionally helps somebody out of it.

They also run mentoring, life skills sessions, community engagement and wellbeing work, mostly aimed at young people and families. As they grow they are developing further programmes around education, employability, mental wellbeing and youth development.

The scale of it

It is worth being clear about the size of this operation, because it is easy to read the list above and imagine a large organisation. 369 Foundation runs on a handful of volunteers, several of them young people themselves. The limiting factor on how many people they reach is not demand and it is not willingness. It is storage, fuel, packaging and hands.

Where your money goes

Donations go towards the running costs that actually constrain the work: ingredients, packaging for the hot meals, fuel for the deliveries, and storage. Every additional round of deliveries is a direct function of those four things.

The charity's own framing of it is that even small amounts mean they can do more and reach more people, which in an operation this lean is literally true rather than a figure of speech.

You can donate on their Help2Fund page: help2fund.org/donations/369foundation-

Volunteering

369 Foundation currently works with a small group of young volunteers and would welcome more. If you are in London and can help with cooking, packing, deliveries or the workshops, contact the charity directly.

About Help2Fund

Help2Fund is a free platform that gives small registered charities in England and Wales promotional support and fundraising infrastructure they would otherwise have to pay for. It is run by a team of volunteers, and the support is personalised to each charity rather than sold as a fixed package: some partners want social media content, some want a donation page, some want help telling a story they have never had the time to write down. Nothing is ever published without the charity signing it off first. In-person volunteering sessions with our partner charities are planned for the future.

Food poverty rarely announces itself. It turns up as a young person in a hostel who has not eaten properly in three days and has told nobody. 369 Foundation gets there before anyone else has noticed.