Purple Shoots, Baobab Bach & The Moondance Foundation

Support from a family foundation has played a key role in the success of two charities addressing poverty in South Wales.

Attendees at a Baobab Bach social group. (Image credit: Baobab Bach).

Poverty is a major challenge in the UK today. According to figures from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, around 14.8 million people in the country were living in poverty as of 2023/4 (more than one in five of the population), and of these nearly a half were living in very deep poverty.[1] In South Wales, two organisations - Purple Shoots and Baobab Bach CIC - which are addressing poverty in their local communities in different ways have both received crucial support from philanthropy to make their work possible.

Purple Shoots is a charity based in Pontypridd, where founder Karen Davies knew from her many years of experience working in the financial services industry that the current system often creates real challenges for people on lower incomes. These people might have a great idea for starting a business, for instance, but are seen as too high-risk for most mainstream banks to lend to. As a result, they are forced to seek loans from less scrupulous lenders, often at very high rates of interest, and thus end up being driven further into poverty. For many people in this situation, it is not an option to save up money instead, but even if they can, they may then face the perverse consequence of losing existing benefits they are entitled to.

To combat these kinds of issues, Purple Shoots offers affordable and transparent loans for start-ups, sole traders, and micro-businesses who have been excluded from mainstream finance. The charity also helps people to create “self-reliant groups”, where members work together on a shared activity that generates an income and decide collectively how to use the money they have generated. Through these groups, people who might be very far from the workplace for various reasons (perhaps because they have caring responsibilities or health issues) are able to develop a new sense of confidence and self-worth.

Volunteers at Miss Tilley’s Community Cafe in Rhiwbina, which has received support from Purple Shoots. (Image credit: Purple Shoots).

Baobab Bach is a community interest company (CIC) based in Bridgend. It works with local business and other organisations to reduce food waste and helps to address food poverty by providing “purple bags” of food for £5 to local people who are struggling with the costs of filling their pantry. Baobab Bach was originally created in 2020. Founder Alison Westwood and a number of colleagues were running a sustainability project for the local authority when the Covid pandemic struck; they realised that many people - especially in more rural outlying areas- had little or no access to supermarkets, and were forced to rely on corner shops, where costs were often high and healthy food choices were few and far between.

Alison knew from her previous work about the vital role that food banks play but felt that there was also a need for a slightly different model of paid-for, but affordable, food. And the response suggested that she was right: the five pantries they opened in October 2020 had grown to ten by Christmas that year and has continued to expand ever since. And it is clear that the value of these pantries is not only in the food they provide, as Alison explains:

“It's not just about the food, it's about the wellbeing. It's about sitting down, having a chat, a cup of tea, whatever, and, and just getting to know people and finding out their backstory. That way you often find out the other needs they have and may be able to signpost them onto other organizations, or things like that.”

Both Purple Shoots and Baobab Bach have benefitted from ongoing support from the Moondance Foundation – the family foundation set up by Diane Briere de l'Isle Engelhardt and her husband Henry Engelhardt, with the fortune he had made from founding and leading the Cardiff-based insurance firm Admiral. And for each organisation, this support has been vital.

For Purple Shoots, the nature of their work – and particularly their focus on offering loans – can sometimes be a barrier when it comes to seeking funding. That is why, as Karen Davies explains:

“Philanthropy is really, really important to us, because we have found that what we do often tends to appeal much more to individual wealthy people - especially people who've made their own money in business - than it does to trusts and foundations, because they understand the journey and how crucial; that support at the beginning can be.”

For Baobab Bach, meanwhile, one of the big challenges was that as a new organisation they didn’t have the track record on paper that many funders required, which is why the early funding from Moondance Foundation was vital for them. As Alison explains:

“I think the thing that was instrumental in us being able to move forward was getting funding from Moondance that didn't require us to have been in existence for so many years. To produce X number of sets of accounts and all the rest of it. Obviously, we had set up properly - we have a bank account, we have a constitution, we have all the things that we need, and we were very careful to do that correctly. But still with a lot of funders it is very difficult to get those first few pots of funding in and to get your track record set up.”

Baobab Bach’s mobile kitchen. (Image credit: Baobab Bach).

Thanks to the support they have received from Moondance Foundation, both organisations have been able to leverage further funding, expand their work and deepen their impact. Purple Shoots now offer its loans across Wales, as well as in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, West Midlands, The West Country and Sussex. In 2024/25, the charity made 52 loans with a total value of £228,324, and helped to run 38 self-reliant groups, which supported 184 people. They have furthermore estimated that this work saved the government around £960,000 in costs, by reducing reliance on benefits and preventing re-offending.

Thanks to the philanthropic support it has received, meanwhile, Baobab Bach has distributed around 60,000 bags of food and help to prevent more than 300 tonnes of food waste since Oct 2020. The organisation has also been able to take on the rental of a property, which has enabled it to expand its food offering, so that it now prepares and distributes home-made frozen ready meals to those who struggle to cook for themselves.

Poverty is a deep-seated problem; and addressing its root causes is likely to require grappling at a fundamental level with how our society is structured.  Philanthropy cannot by itself be the answer, but the support that Moondance Foundation has given to organisations like Purple Shoots and Baobab Bach -which are making a huge difference to the lives of people currently struggling with poverty – shows that philanthropy can play a vital role.

[1] https://www.jrf.org.uk/uk-poverty-2026-the-essential-guide-to-understanding-poverty-in-the-uk