On Friday 25 September 2026, The Parish Trust brought together charities, community organisations and other local partners at the Trethomas Life Centre for Less Talk, More Action!, a practical summit focused on improving the way emergency and food support works across Caerphilly County Borough.
The event was hosted and facilitated by The Parish Trust’s Chief Executive, Rev. Dean Aaron Roberts, and was designed deliberately as a working session to kickstart change within the third sector in Caerphilly.
Organisations were invited to look honestly at the current picture of support across the borough: what is already working well, where there are gaps, where organisations may be duplicating effort, and where greater collaboration could help limited charitable resources go further.
A particular focus of the day was food aid and emergency food support.
Participants explored how food provision currently operates across different communities, including the different ways people access support, geographical coverage, referral arrangements and the challenges organisations face in meeting increasing levels of need.
One of the key outcomes from the event was agreement to take forward plans for a new alliance of organisations involved in food aid and related support across the borough.
The intention is not to replace the individual organisations already doing important work in their communities. Instead, the alliance will provide a way for organisations to communicate more effectively, understand what provision is available across the borough and identify opportunities to work together.
Among the areas the group will now explore are how organisations can make the best use of available food and resources, improve knowledge of provision across the borough, identify gaps in support and develop practical ways of sharing information and working collaboratively.
There was also discussion about the potential for organisations to undertake shared projects where working collectively could achieve more than organisations working independently.
The longer-term aim is simple: to make the food and resources already available within the voluntary and community sector go further, while making it easier for people experiencing hardship to find appropriate support.
Further work will now take place to develop the alliance, its structure and the practical systems that could support collaboration between participating organisations. A working party is being established over the next month, which will become the founding organisations of the new alliance.
Rev. Dean Aaron Roberts, Chief Executive of The Parish Trust, who hosted and facilitated the event, said:
“The whole reason we called this event ‘Less Talk, More Action’ was because we did not want to create another talking shop. There are some brilliant organisations working incredibly hard across our borough, but we know that we can achieve more when we understand what each other is doing and find practical ways of working together.
Food aid is an obvious place to start. Every organisation has limited resources, so if we can collaborate better, share information, understand where the gaps are and find ways of making the food and resources available to us go further, that has to be better for the people we are all here to serve.
Whilst we were hoping for more organisations to attend, what was particularly encouraging today was that there was a genuine appetite from those present to do something together, and they are the obvious organisations to partner with initially. We have agreed to take forward the idea of an alliance around food support, but we also want to look beyond that at shared projects and other practical ways the third sector can collaborate across Caerphilly County Borough.
Today was the conversation. What matters now is what we do next.”
The Parish Trust will now work with participating organisations to take forward the ideas agreed during the session and develop the next steps for the proposed alliance.
