The History

NotJUST (International) is the development and amalgamation of projects founder Lea Beven has been running since starting her career as a full-time humanitarian worker in 2015. Lea (but friends call her Daisy) built numerous projects out of repurposing dead stock and empty spaces into charitable enterprises.

When 2020 hit, food manufacturers were left with pallets of perfectly good food they’d have to pay to dispose of. Instead, they donated the food to Daisy and the Food Share Project was born. Based in the Wellington Town Hall, people struggling for food would visit for free bags of food.

Daisy and her team of volunteers soon realised that the Food Share Project needed to be able to sustain itself under the demand in Wellington, and pay rent as the town hall wouldn’t be available forever. The project grew into a discount surplus food store with supplemental freebies, supporting an in-house independent food bank. This discount store was able to support the mammoth task of sourcing and sending 889 pallets of food and aid to Ukraine when the crisis started in 2022.

Fast-forward to today, 3 years later, and the project has expanded to cover 3 locations across the country with no signs of slowing down. Due to everything it encompasses, from food banks to community fridges and freezers to pet food banks to waste prevention to a cafe with homeless outreach to diversity for dinner to humanitarian work (let me take a breath for a second) we rebranded to NotJUST. Because we are NotJUST one project, we are multiple projects running at the same time.