Most companies can tell you their carbon figure. Very few can tell you what they did for their own town.
Ask a finance director for last year's emissions and you will get a number to two decimal places. Ask what the company did for the community it operates in and you will usually get a photograph of some people in branded t-shirts holding a cheque.
That is not cynicism about the intent. It is a reporting problem. Environmental impact has had twenty years of standards, audits and software built around it. Community impact has had almost none, so it stays vague, and vague is worth nothing in an annual report, a tender response or a conversation with somebody deciding whether to work for you.
Supporting a county on this site is not a grand gesture. It is a specific one, and specific is the part that is hard to buy.
How this is presented, and how it is not
We will not put your logo in front of somebody in the middle of the worst week of their year and call it exposure. That would be a poor thing to do and a worse thing for you to be part of.
What happens instead is straightforward. The food bank information comes first, in full, with nothing in its way. At the foot of the page there is a line acknowledging that the listings for that county are checked and kept accurate because your business funds the work. Anyone who wants to know more about you can follow it. Nobody is asked to.
That distinction matters to us because of the food banks we work with, and it should matter to you because of the proposal you will have to write internally. “We fund the food bank directory for our county” is a sentence anybody can put their name to. The other version is not.
What you can say afterwards
“In 2027 we funded the food bank directory for Staffordshire. Every food bank, pantry and community larder in the county was listed, checked and kept accurate, free to anyone who needed it, for a year.”
That sentence has a place, a year, a beneficiary and a verifiable fact behind it. You can put it in a strategic report, a tender response, an induction pack or a note to your team, and every part of it will stand up to somebody checking.
If you have to report on this
Section 172
Every large UK company must publish a statement describing how its directors had regard to the impact of the business on the community. Large means meeting two of three tests: turnover above £36 million, balance sheet above £18 million, or more than 250 employees. It is filed at Companies House and it is public. Most companies fill that section with generalities because they have nothing precise to put in it. This gives you something precise, tied to the places you actually operate.
Social value in bids
Around four in five public tenders over half a million pounds now score social value, and from January 2027 the weighting on central government contracts is at least ten per cent, rising to twenty on larger ones. Evaluators reward committed partnerships with named organisations over statements of intent. A twelve-month supporter agreement covering a named county is a named commitment with a start date, an end date and an invoice behind it.
What you can put in writing
Your support is acknowledged publicly on this site, so anyone assessing your claim can verify it in a few seconds. We will confirm the arrangement in writing for a tender, an assessor or an auditor if you ask.
What you cannot claim
Supporting a county does not deliver food to anybody. It funds accurate information. Be precise about that and it will stand up to any amount of scrutiny. Overstate it and it will not. We will also not tell you how this should be treated in your accounts, because that is a question for your accountant and not for us.
Being honest about the limits
This will not win you a contract on its own and we will not pretend otherwise. It is one specific, defensible line in a section where most companies write something woolly. That is all, and that is quite a lot.
What we send you
Every county supporter gets a written summary at the end of their year: how many people used the food bank pages in your county, how many listings we checked and corrected, how many had changed their opening times or referral rules, and where your support was acknowledged.
It is written to be pasted straight into your own reporting. No graphs about how well we are doing. Just the facts about your county, in your county's name.
Why this instead of giving to a charity
You should do both, honestly. They do different jobs.
A donation to a food bank charity buys food and pays for the people who hand it out. That is the most important thing anybody can fund and nothing here competes with it.
What a donation does not do is help somebody find the food bank in the first place. Every year people walk to a building that closed six months ago, or turn up on a Tuesday to a service that moved to Thursdays, or give up because the first three results they found were out of date. Somebody has to do the unglamorous work of ringing round and asking. That is what you would be paying for.
There is also a practical difference. A donation is a donation and sits in your accounts as one. Supporting a county is a commercial arrangement with a written agreement and a business invoice behind it.
Your team will care more than you expect
The people who work for you know somebody who has used a food bank. In some of your teams it will be more than one, and they will not have said. This is not an abstract cause happening to strangers in another part of the country. It is happening in the postcode your office sits in.
Telling your staff that the company keeps the food bank listings running for their county lands differently to telling them about a corporate donation to a national organisation. It is theirs. It is nearby. And they can check it in about eight seconds on their phone.
More than one county
Several counties, a whole region, or every county you have a site in.
If you employ people across the country, covering the counties your staff actually live in makes a better story internally than one county picked at random. Tell us where you operate and we will come back with a price and a list.
Three-year commitments cost ten per cent less and lock the price for the full term.
Independence
Supporters fund the work. They do not influence it. No supporter has any say over which food banks are listed, how they are described, the order anything appears in, or anything we write. Any link to a supporter's own website is marked as a paid relationship rather than an editorial recommendation. Any food bank can ask us to leave supporter acknowledgements off its own listing, and we will do it the same day, without asking why.