Mark Game, CEO of FoodCycle, shares a busy week driving the mission to bring people together through community meals. Before starting his role in April, Mark previously founded both Community Shop and The Bread and Butter Thing. He is passionate about reducing food waste and ensuring everybody has access to good food and company.

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Monday
I start the week reading through our latest guest feedback. I'm an accountant by trade, so I naturally gravitate towards the numbers.

This time though, the gold isn't in the figures, it’s in the comments. Guests talk about trying new foods, making friends, having somewhere they look forward to going each week and feeling welcomed. The comments got under my skin because they point to the kinds of impact that are hard to define. We clearly understand what FoodCycle does, but how do we capture the thing that gives every community meal its own buzz? More importantly, how do we make sure we never lose it?

It also made me reflect on how as charities we can become so focused on measuring outcomes that we overlook the experiences that create them. We can count meals, volunteers and guests. Understanding what creates that feeling when people walk through the door is much harder, but no less important.

I took Blue, my dog, for a long walk. While he was busy sniffing every hedge he could find, I found myself thinking about something we'd been discussing all week. Perhaps we spend too much time measuring what happens, and not enough time paying attention to why it happens in the first place.

Tuesday
Tuesday starts with a hackathon alongside one of our corporate partners. They're helping us analyse thousands of responses from our volunteer surveys, looking for patterns that might tell us how to recruit, support and retain volunteers more effectively.

I love data. It helps us ask better questions and make better decisions. But as I read through the individual comments afterwards, I'm reminded of its limitations. Spreadsheets can tell you that volunteering improves wellbeing. They can't convey what it feels like when someone writes that volunteering helped them stay sober, or that for a few hours each week their disability simply stopped defining them.

Those stories are harder to measure, but they're often where the real value lies. Data tells us what is happening. People help us understand why.

Wednesday
Today I’m out showing a corporate partner around FoodCycle Islington. We’re greeted with colourful, fresh ingredients covering every work surface, and volunteers producing food that many restaurants would have been proud to serve. The quality, variety and care genuinely impressed me. It reminded me that dignity isn't just about being welcomed through the door. It's also about taking genuine pride in what arrives on the plate.

Later I’m out at another community meal. Another brilliant group of volunteers. Another reminder that no two FoodCycle communities are the same. I sat down to eat with the guests and got talking to a retired lady who comes most weeks. "I don't come for the free food, dear," she said. "I come for the company." She then told me she'd met two guests experiencing homelessness at a FoodCycle meal. Over time she'd got to know them, helped them find somewhere to live and, as it happened, they now lived in the same block of flats as her. "They're my neighbours now."

Measure that. I haven't stopped thinking about it. FoodCycle didn't set out to create that outcome. Nobody planned it. But it says something important about what can happen when people sit around a table together, week after week.

Thursday
An early train down from Manchester to London for our all-staff away day. During one session I asked everyone to complete a simple sentence: "At its best, FoodCycle is..."

I genuinely didn't know what to expect. What surprised me wasn't that people used different words. It was that they all seemed to describe the same thing. Very few people talked about meals. Instead, they spoke about dignity, confidence, friendship, belonging, hospitality and then someone simply said: "Warmth." Around the room, heads nodded.

You spend your first few months wondering whether you've understood an organisation properly. Listening to colleagues describe FoodCycle so consistently made me think we probably know exactly who we are. Our challenge isn't discovering it. It's finding the simplest way to explain it to everyone else.

Friday
An admin day and time to reflect. When you join an organisation in a leadership role, the team naturally holds its breath a little. Everyone wonders what changes the new CEO has in mind.
I had the advantage of already knowing FoodCycle as I'd been a trustee for several years, but becoming CEO is very different.

Every organisation has plans, priorities and strategies. They're important, but I've learnt that the first job of anyone taking the helm isn't to arrive with the answers. It's to pay attention, listen and learn.

That means understanding the finances, looking at the data and asking questions. But it also means getting out and spending time with the people who know the organisation best; our team, our volunteers and our guests.

That's what much of this week has been about. As it comes to an end, I realise that the moments I'd been reflecting on had very little in common on the surface. Yet they all pointed to the same conclusion. Leadership isn't about collecting interesting anecdotes. It's about paying attention to the patterns between them.

The spreadsheets tell me where to look. People tell me what matters. The trick is remembering that you need both.

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