Maria Ana Neves, MA, FRSA
Co-founder, Plan Zheroes
In the UK, there are 4 million people living below the breadline. At the same time, the food retail industry sends 1.6million tones of surplus food to landfill.
Plan Zheroes is a citizen-led initiative to inspire food businesses to give their surplus food to those who need it. While some organizations, such as Pret a Manger, FoodCycle and FareShare are already working to reduce food waste and diverting surplus food to people who need it, there are still many more who don’t know this is possible and are not aware of the range of existing solutions.
Plan Zheroes work to build relationships between neighbouring donors and recipients, by matching their specific profiles, and at this stage over 250 businesses and 200 charities are already engaged.
Maria Ana Neves, MA, FRSA is an entrepreneurial, idea-driven systems thinker as well as a strategist, working in innovation projects for business and social change. She trained to be a designer, and has led businesses and processes of change through design thinking skills. Beyond social innovation projects like Plan Zheroes, Maria Ana is an Associate Lecturer at Central St Martins and the founder or The Thinking Hotel.
Find out more about Plan Zheroes: planzheroes.org