Social Bite X itison partner up to fundraise for Christmas dinners for homeless people in Glasgow
Two Scottish social enterprises have teamed up for the tenth year to launch a public campaign, asking people to buy a Christmas dinner for the homeless. We caught up with the two founders, Josh Littlejohn and Ollie Norman outside Social Bite on Sauchiehall Street.
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00:00 Over 10 years ago, Josh approached me at It Is On with an incredible idea and today, fast
00:04 forward 10 years, we've fundraised over £3 million, 750,000 meals for the homeless.
00:09 This was back in 2014, we decided to open up our social bike cafes on Christmas Day
00:15 for people that were homeless but we didn't have very much money to rub together as a
00:18 tiny little charity so we approached Ollie and asked him if he might run a deal on It
00:22 Is On where someone could buy a homeless person a Christmas dinner for £5 and he agreed to
00:27 do that and I remember he asked us how many we'd like to sell and I said, well maybe if
00:32 we could sell 800 dinners at £5 then we could fund, open up two cafes and he said what happens
00:39 if you sell more and I said well we're struggling to feed people to fund that in the new year
00:43 so maybe we could keep our funds topped up for a couple of weeks into the new year to
00:47 help fund people and the deal launched and we were all glued to the laptops watching
00:52 it and it sold 800 target in about 10 minutes and it ran for two weeks in the run up to
00:57 Christmas and sold 36,000 Christmas dinners so that was the start of this incredible fundraising
01:03 partnership that's really turned out to be the lifeblood of Social Bite as a charity.
01:07 Since this cost of living crisis and after the pandemic, we're also seeing an increasing
01:12 number of people that you might not have otherwise expected that are just really struggling to
01:16 make ends meet and they might be living in temporary homeless accommodations and they
01:20 might be really lonely in that accommodation coming up to Christmas so it not just gives
01:25 the opportunity for a meal but also that loving company from the team and you know kind of
01:29 a sense of community as well.
01:31 We're just a facilitator, a funder through our membership but also giving the eyeballs
01:36 and the exposure so we reach a million and a half people every single day, that is a
01:42 huge catalyst to understanding the problem in Scotland specifically and then through
01:46 that Social Bite and Josh has been able to do all sorts of different things, I think
01:50 it's opened doors, I think it's not only facilitated the meals for the homeless, these
01:56 guys are unbelievably entrepreneurial, we're an entrepreneurial organisation and I think
02:00 the meeting of those two minds is really powerful.
02:02 Actually it's a really exciting aspect of Vietas On deal this year that people as well
02:06 as donating for a meal or a gift for someone, they can also donate £5 and we're calling
02:11 that to give the gift of home and that's to help us build two new Social Bite villages
02:15 and that's a really kind of long term intervention to actually help put roofs over people's heads
02:20 and so the Social Bite village is a project in Edinburgh that has been going on for six
02:25 years now and it's a little community where we've built prefabricated homes and a community
02:29 hub for people to come and live and it's helped over 100 people out of homelessness and we're
02:34 trying to build two more, one in Greater Glasgow and we're working with South Lanarkshire Council
02:39 and the other one in Dundee.
02:40 There's several things I'd love people to know, number one, get onto VietasOn.com, give
02:45 whatever you can, buy whatever you can, it starts at £5.
02:49 For me, so many people at this time of year, myself included, often buy frivolous stuff,
02:53 whether it's Christmas cards which I consider frivolous or stocking fillers, give one of
02:58 these, you'll feel great about yourself but you'll also have the knowledge that somebody
03:02 who's sleeping rough in this weather will get some incredible respite from Social Bite.
03:06 It makes such a difference, not just at Christmas but throughout the year.
03:10 As Ollie said, there's so many secret Santas going around just now, I hear beautiful stories
03:15 of these vouchers being printed off and put in their children's stockings or they're put
03:19 on the Christmas table when people are sitting down for their own Christmas dinner so it's
03:24 incredible to see these little annual traditions emerge from the Citizen's Partnership.