Earlier today Nando’s announced ‘Fuel Your Future ‘a new food donation and employment programme seeing Nando restaurants across London, Birmingham, the North East and East Midlands serving up free meals once a week to vulnerable young people and their families.
The programme aims to help with both the immediate need for free meals, and most importantly a long-term impact on the lives of disadvantaged young people, through supporting their futures with employment opportunities.
With the number of free meals served doubling week on week since the scheme began in June, and with more Nando’s locations participating in the coming weeks, Nando’s is aiming to donate over 15,000 free meals to disadvantaged young people across the UK by the end of the trial period.
Fuel Your Future won’t stop there though, Nando’s has an aspiration of building the programme out nationally over time to ultimately donate half a million meals a year.
Over the last three years, Nando’s has worked closely with several external partners including the charity Family Action and their HeadStart programme, supporting more than 200 young people into employment. In addition, in 2020 alone, aside to job placements, these partnerships have had a positive impact on 1,291 young people’s lives through employability workshops, training, support and career discovery days. Over the last 3 years young people from HeadStart in partnership with Nando’s have also volunteered nearly 40k hours in local communities as part of the scheme.
Looking forward, Nando’s have ambitions to create in the region of 500 new job placements across the business through Family Action’s, HeadStart programme, and Nando’s other partnerships with Springboard, Remit, The Forward Trust and The Shaw Trust. These opportunities will pick back up in due course when the job landscape is a little clearer regarding COVID-19 and Nando’s hope to be able to increase the number of job placements year on year. In the short term, there will be a stronger focus not just job outcomes but also work experience opportunities and mentoring for young people across the Nando’s business.
By partnering with Family Action again on Fuel Your Future, Nando’s can identify young people who are currently eligible for Free School Meals, coming out of care or are young carers themselves. Each local Nando’s restaurant can then connect with these young people, and their families, so they can pick up a meal once a week. A small gesture but a good place to start.
Fuel Your Future is the latest part of Nando’s longstanding commitment to make each restaurant an important part of their community and builds on the existing Nando’s No Chuckin’ Our Chicken food donation programme, which has donated more than 2.3 million meals to homeless charities and food banks since it started in 2013. Nando’s intends to take on board learnings from its existing programme which will continue to run in parallel and implement them into Fuel Your Future as it grows across the UK.
Since lockdown began Nando’s has also donated over 150,000 meals to local charities, the NHS and FareShare in partnership with Deliveroo. While the No Chuckin’ Our Chicken food donation programme and NHS support will continue, the effects of the pandemic have made it clear that there are other important groups being missed who could be helped as well.
The Fuel Your Future food donation scheme is aimed at vulnerable young people and their families in the UK who are going to be feeling the long-term impacts of the pandemic. As a business Nando’s has always had a passion for helping young people. They make up the majority of the Nando’s team in each restaurant and the customers who love Nando’s PERi-PERi. However, for many young people in the UK at the moment their future is looking more uncertain than ever.
Nando’s has a unique position as a brand to help this group and whilst job opportunities might be difficult at this moment due to COVID-19, we can put in place the structure to enable young people to have resilience and thrive through our Fuel Your Future programme.
Continuous removal of viruses from high touch technology
Looking for hospitality partners to fight the invisible foe in customer confidence
Safe Hospitality: Keep hand washing front of mind
Sustainable hospitality face masks
Visa and Mastercard Overcharging Refund, a well-timed potential financial windfall for hospitality
Sage say schools to open and hospitality to close is a political decision
The Covid-19 crisis in hospitality is also being featured in our Facebook and twitter social media
Nando’s Fuel Your Future – 20 August 2020 – Nando’s Fuel Your Future
