“You measure the degree of civilization of a society by how it treats its weakest members.”

This quote has been attributed in various forms to historical figures from Pope John Paul to Dostoevsky, Churchill and even Gandhi. It is a commonly held British value that we should treat others how we’d wish to be treated.

The UK’s food poverty crisis has been getting worse for the best part of a decade. From austerity to universal credit, by that quote above our society’s score is dropping like a stone. This year we’ve come together to support the Trussell Trust and Hammersmith & Fulham Foodbank. It’s an initiative we’re calling Hacking For Foodbanks, that will continue beyond 44CON. While it’s been founded by 44CON crew, we want it to be bigger and separate to 44CON. Food poverty is a national problem and we need your help to help those that need it the most. Hacking For Foodbanks has a 4-point plan to make an impact on UK food poverty through cybersecurity and the tech industry, which you can read more about here.

Help us raise money at 44CON

We want you to bring your (working) retro, old and cool tech that you’re willing to part with as part of a bring and buy sale operated by Hammersmith & Fulham Foodbank and the Trussell Trust. We’ll provide tags so you can set a suggested price for your donated goods, and people can come along to the Trussell Trust table and put in an offer. Got a reasonable-sized retro-battlestation like a Rubber keyed spectrum? Fantastic! WPA injection wifi cards and Hayes serial modems? Super! We’re ideally looking for bric a brac others would want to buy at £5-£50 in suggested value.

Anything that doesn’t get sold can be picked up by the people that dropped it off, or alternatively we’ll donate the kit to similar activities at other UK events.

We’re also offering people the opportunity to make a donation to the initiative both at the event and when they buy a ticket, or register for the free open evening.

All funds raised will be split 50/50 between Hammersmith & Fulham Foodbank and the Trussell Trust, in order to support foodbank activity in Fulham and across the UK.

Get involved

We’re also looking for people to take part in our mentoring scheme, to be piloted in early 2019. In particular we want people from non-technical as well as technical fields, particularly where a university degree isn’t required. We want to raise awareness for foodbank users that there are career opportunities out there, from sales and recruiting to technical jobs. We want to bring these opportunities to interested and able foodbank users and help them when they need a hand the most. Most important of all, we want to eliminate UK food poverty, one family at a time. If you’d like to help, wherever you are just drop us an email.