Fuel Your Finances

As the cost-of-living crisis escalated, Family Action recognised that access to food alone was no longer enough. Families attending FOOD Clubs were increasingly unable to afford to cook, declining certain foods or requesting items that required little or no energy use. This revealed a hidden crisis: food poverty compounded by energy poverty, financial stress and limited access to support.

In response, Family Action developed Fuel Your Finances, an innovative and flexible extension of its FOOD Clubs, bringing together affordable food, energy efficiency advice, financial guidance and cooking skills. The model was intentionally designed to adapt rapidly to very different communities, with delivery shaped by lived experience, local insight and frontline learning.

Piloted in Mansfield and London, the service demonstrated exceptional agility in practice.

In Mansfield, delivery focused on multi‑generational families facing unemployment, poor health and isolation, with practical sessions on budgeting, slow cooking, energy use, and outreach within sheltered accommodation.

In London, the programme was adapted for newly arrived Bengali and Bangladeshi women, many with English as a second language. This required translated resources, culturally appropriate recipes, and new approaches to engagement, including the creation of new visual resources.

Delivered through trusted FOOD Club settings, the service combined informal workshops, one-to-one support and practical resources such as slow cookers and carbon monoxide alarms. Participants reported increased confidence, safer cooking practices and significant savings on energy bills, with one participant avoiding a potentially fatal carbon monoxide incident as a direct result of the programme.