Amazon and former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, together with charity The Felix Project, are launching an initiative in London to donate essential goods to help 40,000 families.

The initiative, which will be London’s first ‘multibank’, will be led by the Felix Project with support from Amazon, Brown and the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.

The service will help families experiencing poverty by providing essentials like toiletries, baby products, cleaning goods and bedding donated by Amazon, and other national and regional businesses.

It is an expansion of the Multibank network, co-founded by Gordon Brown and Amazon, which has now donated more than 3 million essential goods to help over 400,000 families from multibanks currently operating in Scotland, Greater Manchester, and Wales.

Mayor Sadiq Khan has committed £250,000 to help with running costs for the London site. Additional funding has been provided through the Multibank Fund, established with £1 million of seed funding from Amazon and Comic Relief, to help finance the expansion of Multibanks in areas of need across the UK.

Amazon helped to establish the warehouse operations, five Amazon employees will work on-site for the first full year of operation, and the company will provide logistics support to transport the donations to community organisations across London.

“Thanks to this incredible partnership, Felix’s Multibank will be able to ensure our network of community organisations can provide more of the things people need and just as importantly prevent perfectly usable items from going to waste,” Felix Project CEO, Charlotte Hill OBE said.

Former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, added: “Felix’s Multibank will be able to take a holistic view of the overall need of the families they serve and provide some of the non-food basics for those in greatest need across London. We are grateful to the companies and foundations who are supporting the Multibanks and to The Felix Project for joining with us to make the roll out in London possible.”

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