Food bank stigma in Wales costs people the help they need, and Steven Crichton, a therapist from Pontypridd, is doing something concrete about it.
Crichton, who used a food bank to feed his family in the weeks after graduating from the University of South Wales, now volunteers with Taff-Ely Foodbank’s lived experience group, helping the charity redesign its service from the inside. His argument is simple: shame stops people from walking through the door, and that silence costs lives.
From Heroin Addiction to Therapy Practice
Crichton lost his father to suicide when he was six years old. He describes carrying the belief that ‘bad things happen to me’ for decades afterwards, a conviction that fed mental health crises and, eventually, an addiction to heroin.
Counselling broke the cycle. Twenty-six years after losing his father, he found himself in a therapist’s room and decided that was the work he wanted to do. He enrolled at the University of South Wales in his thirties, where he met his partner Kat. The timeline accelerated fast: they moved in together, had a baby, and on graduation day Crichton proposed.
The weeks that followed were harder. With a new business to build and no income yet, he and Kat skipped meals to keep ‘full lunch boxes’ for the children. They turned to Taff-Ely Foodbank (charity number 1195468), based at Ely Valley Business Park in Pontyclun.
He had expected to feel diminished. He did not. ‘I was like, this is a victory,’ he said. ‘I’m strong, I’m not weak. I’m courageous.’
The University of South Wales had also supported him in getting his therapy practice off the ground through its Enterprise Startup Fund, which is designed to help students and graduates take the first steps toward launching a business or freelance career.
Tackling Food Bank Stigma in Wales
Food bank stigma in Wales is not a minor inconvenience. Trussell reported that food banks in its community across Wales distributed 154,040 emergency food parcels in the full year ending 2025. Across the UK, the total exceeded 2.6 million parcels, the equivalent of one every 12 seconds. And according to Trussell’s mid-year data, more than 277,000 people visited a Trussell community food bank for the first time between April and September 2024 alone. Every one of them had to get past the door first.
That threshold moment is precisely what Crichton’s lived experience group is trying to ease. Its suggestions have already produced changes at Taff-Ely: the charity has stopped writing on its carrier bags with marker pen, removing a visible signal that the bags came from a food bank. Visitors can now select some of their own food within an allowance, and swap items they do not want.
‘It gives people a bit more independence and autonomy,’ Crichton said. ‘They can pick their own items, they can trade one thing for another, there’s still a certain allowance but it saves food waste.’
Matthew Stevens, partnership co-ordinator at Taff-Ely Foodbank, said reducing stigma had been a priority. ‘Anybody might need to use a food bank and tackling that shame ensures that people who need support are going to get it,’ he said.
Stevens was direct about why Crichton’s involvement matters beyond goodwill. ‘Having that background ensures that he knows exactly what it’s like for somebody to walk through the doors of the food bank for the first time,’ he said. ‘It ensures that our volunteers know exactly what it’s like and can accommodate that and it ensures again that people can get the support they need that’s going to be effective in helping them out of their crises.’
Crichton’s broader point is about the language people use when they are struggling. ‘Shame and stigma’ stop people reaching out, he argues, and re-framing a visit to a food bank as an act of courage rather than defeat is not spin. It is, he would say, clinical accuracy.
He now runs his own therapy business and consults with charities on making their services more user-friendly. Giving back, he says, will always come before anything else.
The question for Wales’s food banks is whether Crichton’s model, redesigning services around the testimony of people who have actually used them, can be replicated at scale. With 154,040 parcels distributed across Wales in 2025, the demand is not shrinking. The stigma needs to shrink instead.
