As the Covid-19 pandemic ravaged the global community at the start of 2020, landlord Raj Kumari Byford was horrified by headlines showing families struggling to get by. As lockdown was announced, she felt compelled to help and raced down to her local garden centre café to buy everything she could to help those in need.

Fast-forward 18 months, and that act of kindness has spawned a major social enterprise project, which has helped the global community. From feeding local families, the project has snowballed, with Raj and husband Colin going on to stock food banks, manufacture face masks and fund life-saving ventilators after setting up global community interest company One Thought Changes All.

“I knew that many families in my community relied on food banks, and I couldn’t stand the thought of any food going to waste. I wanted to do something to help,” says Raj. “The day after my visit to the garden centre café, myself and some friends provided more than 2,400 meals for around 200 families. “The need for food by the food banks and crisis centres was phenomenal and I remember saying to my husband that I didn’t just want to provide these families with the means to make a meal for 10 days and then walk away,” says Raj.

It was this drive to make a difference that led the couple to set up the global community company to offer whatever help they could.

One of the first initiatives for the not-for-profit social enterprise was a project called the Food Share.

This saw them work with major companies, including supermarket Morrisons and other community groups, to help distribute food to those in need, and to identify what goods were needed. And while the country has now opened up again, the initiative is still running. “Essentially, we are the food bank to food banks and crisis centres,” says Raj. “I would estimate we have contributed in excess of 1.5 million meals since we got started 18 months ago.” 

Raj and Colin live in Surrey with their two children and have been private landlords for more than 30 years. Raj was born to parents originally from Punjab, India, and grew up in Bilston, West Midlands. She was the first woman in her family to be educated and says it was partly her experiences of having free school meals and a free school uniform as a child that has fuelled her passion to help those less fortunate.

“We try to be landlords with a heart, and we want to help our tenants where we can. We reached out to them all at the start of the pandemic to see that they were coping, and wanted to reach out to other communities, especially those people who were particularly vulnerable and most in need.” She describes the decision to branch out into producing face masks as a leap of faith, with neither she nor her husband having any previous experience in manufacturing.

She says: “My background is finance and property, and my husband’s is property and construction, so we had never done anything like this before. But when we could see lives were being lost, we decided we needed to just go for it.” The masks, which are made from a specialist treated fabric and manufactured in the UK, have been donated across the UK and worldwide.

They are being sold online, with all the net profits ploughed into charity projects through the company’s ‘hand out for a hand up’ scheme.

To date, the company has supported in excess of 70 initiatives across 10 countries, including Brazil, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Malawi, Mexico, the UAE, UK, the US and Venezuela. Raj says: “We are providing masks for free for those who cannot afford them and have donated to inner-city schools, charities and hospices across the UK. This project is all about supporting the most vulnerable people.

“In terms of our global work, we are running many different projects across the world. We have sent 1,000 masks to Venezuela and we are in the process of shipping 100 ventilators manufactured in China over to Ethiopia, where there is a huge shortage. We have also donated money for food, medicine and masks for people on the streets there. “We also worked with the Lions Club Coventry to set up the Patna project in India, which has seen us provide sewing machines and a trainer to teach women how to sew, and a sponsorship and food programme with a school in Punjab, which serves vulnerable families from 30 villages.” Both are being managed locally and are making a huge difference to people’s lives.

Raj’s good work hasn’t gone unnoticed, with One Thought changes All named as one of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce’s Business Heroes of 2020 and shortlisted as a finalist in the Surrey Business Awards. Now, not content with all she has achieved so far, Raj plans to build two community centres in the West Midlands and Surrey.

These eco-friendly Centres of Excellence will offer a range of support services from access to a community fridge and store cupboard to classes on cooking nutritious meals on a budget. They will also offer advice on budgeting, act as a skills share hub and run workshops where unwanted items can be reused or recycled, and house an eco shop selling sustainable products. “Everything we do is about bringing healthy, happy communities together to help and support the most vulnerable,” says Raj. “We are all about making big changes, one step at a time.”

Blog Post from Victoria Barker & Sally Walmsley @ NRLA

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