Our Mission
The Food Chain changes and saves lives by ensuring that people living with HIV have access to tailored nutrition services, provided free through a network of skilled volunteers. Nutritional expertise is shared with a wider audience through publications and fact sheets, and information is collected and shared with partner organisations to influence policy and improve the lives of people living with HIV.
Our Vision
To ensure that people living with HIV have access to essential food and nutritional information, enabling them to make informed decisions, stay well and lead healthy, independent lives.
Our Values:
Our Values inspire our work. They direct how we should behave in order to achieve our vision.
Together we are:
Empowering:
We want to help people when they are their most vulnerable but also ensure that they build knowledge and skills to make good nutrition choices for themselves and their families at any stage in their life with HIV. This value extends equally to our volunteers. Delivering our services through volunteering is important to us - we want our volunteers to find their experience of helping us deliver our services personally rewarding and enable them to build skills to benefit themselves and others throughout their lives.
Adaptable:
We have always been driven by the view that if an individual does not eat the food we provide, then we have failed. So we will continue to be as flexible as possible and change our services to ensure maximum impact and a personalised service providing meals that meet nutritional and ethnic needs. We also provide a range of roles to allow our volunteers to contribute in the way they would most enjoy and vary their experiences. For some this has kept their passion alive for 18 years!
Authoritative:
Our knowledge and experience place us among the leading voluntary sector experts on HIV and nutrition in this country. No other charity provides our unique service in the UK. The Food Chain is dedicated to providing nutritional advice from evidence-based, peer-reviewed research to ensure our service users receive the best possible advice, information and meals in regards to their personal circumstances.
As individuals we aim to be:
Inclusive:
HIV does not discriminate and nor do we. By striving to meet the needs of individuals we assist communities or varying ethnicity, financial means, sexuality, gender and age. Understanding difference and the importance of confidentiality helps us to meet the needs of service users better. The everyday behaviour of The Food Chain staff and volunteers reflects that commitment.
Knowledgeable:
Many of our volunteers are experts - part of their role is to share that knowledge with others and broaden our understanding through contact with the people we help. We invest in training our volunteers and our service users to make that happen. We aim to document this fully to share with professionals and individuals wherever they may be.
A Community:
It is not all about the work or the illness. Through working together we have a supportive and nuturing community of individuals and organisations sharing knowledge and time.
