Profile piece, Liam Loftus

In every newsletter, we chat to someone from our Foodbank who has gone above and beyond to support our visitors and help us achieve our aim of ending the need for food banks. This month, we spoke to Liam Loftus, who has served in a number of positions at Cambridge City Foodbank and is now taking up post as our new Development Director.

Read on to learn more about Liam, how and why he got involved with the Foodbank, and his love for outdoor cooking!

Can you tell us a bit about your background?

I grew up between Liverpool and Manchester in a town called Widnes. The sense of community there was and still is incredibly powerful and I have fond memories of fellow residents going above and beyond to help each other out. That part of my life and growing up there has really stuck with me and has guided me throughout my life.

At school, I enjoyed science but I didn’t really know what to do beyond that. Eventually, the time came to apply to university and I decided to stick with the subject and figure out how I could use it to help people – medicine felt like a natural fit for me. I applied to study at Oxford and, despite having some initial doubts about whether I’d fit in or not, I had a fantastic time. That was also where I met my wife. After finishing my degree in medicine, I completed my foundation years of medical training. It’s during this time in your medical training that you start to specialise in one particular area and, for me, it was an easy choice to become a GP. I always wanted to work within a community and I liked the idea of being a family doctor figure who builds relationships with their patients.

Can you tell us how and why you came to be involved in the Foodbank?

As a GP, even though you help your patients through the issues that they’re facing, often, I felt like more could be done to address the root causes of their health problems. I felt in some cases that I was treating patients and sending them back into the environment that was making them unwell in the first place. Access to nutritious food has a huge impact on people’s lives – you can’t do well in school, work or live a fulfilling life if you’re hungry. There are wider issues in society that I don’t think a GP can solve and the Foodbank felt like the best place for me to tackle some of these issues.

Can you talk us through your journey with the Foodbank?

I initially volunteered at C3 as part of their Friday morning team and handed out food parcels to visitors. This helped me to understand how the Foodbank operates each day gave me the opportunity to speak with visitors. I was able to learn about the issues that they’ve faced and why they turned to the Foodbank for support.

I was then asked to Chair the Foodbank’s Fairbite Development Team where I helped staff understand how best they could set up their social supermarkets. I spoke to social supermarkets all over the country about what works well and what challenges they faced, and identified the aspects that we felt were most relevant to Cambridge in order to influence our final strategy.

Over the past 12 months, I’ve been working as a Health Inequalities Consultant where I have been able to use my background as a GP to guide the future of the Foodbank. I’m so proud to say that, in the last three months, we’ve opened up three new social supermarkets in Cambridge.

What is your new role?

I’m about to take on the role of Development Director. It’s a new role within the Foodbank that is centred around organising and enabling the resources in Cambridge to achieve our goal of ending the need for food banks. For example, the growing of our Fairbite offering and the success of our financial inclusion project are initiatives that we have introduced in order to reduce the chronic need for emergency food, but these come with a financial cost. To help sustain this and other Foodbank projects for as long as is it needed, I will be working to engage local people, business, charities, the health sector and more, and working on bringing each of these parties together to help us to achieve our goal.

What do you enjoy doing when you’re not at work?

My wife and I really enjoy food and cooking. We do a lot of outdoor cooking in the summer whenever the weather allows it and enjoy making Italian food together. We’re also expecting a child which may be born by the time you are reading this! This is, of course, keeping us very busy.

I’m a huge sports fan in general and love football. Growing up near Manchester, I grew up as a Manchester United fan, but I haven’t had time to go to a lot of games recently. Initially, my wife wasn’t particularly keen on football, but since women’s football has had a surge in popularity, she’s become really involved which is fantastic. We’re both now season ticket holders at Arsenal W.F.C. This took me a while to get into having grown up as a Manchester United fan, but I’m fully invested now!