The Challenge

Spend 7 days feeding yourself with £1 a day-the UK equivalent of the extreme poverty line. 

Kerry Hallam, Lynne Craven and myself are taking part in Live Below the Line to raise awareness of the 1.4 billion people who have no choice but to live below the poverty line every day of their lives and have to make £1 cover a lot more than food.
For one week the three of us are going to have just £1 a day to spend on food in an attempt to raise awareness of extreme poverty and have our own experience of making money go a lot further than we're used to. 


Across three continents people have been joining in the Live Below the Line movement to tackle extreme poverty. Live Below the Line has been running all over the UK, Australia and the USA simultaneously, with more than 20,000 people taking part.  


The official challenge took place from the 7th-11th May, where thousands of people spent 5 days living of £1 a day. Although the official challenge has come and gone the three of us have decided to join the party. 


Here's how it's going to work for us...


Kerry, Lynne and myself are teaming up to take the challenge together. Since we are spending 7 days living off £1 a day we each have £7 to spend on food for a week. We are going to combine that money so the three of us together have £21 to spend on food for 7 days. Sounds easier now doesn't it? Well, pooling our money in this way certainly does make the challenge a bit easier to digest. However when you consider that that £21 has to buy 3 meals a day for 3 people for 7 days, which works out at 63 meals in total, the challenge suddenly gets its bite back. (I could go all day with these foody puns). 


The Rules...

• The full cost of all the items you consume must be included in your budget (£21). This means budgeting for whole packets of food items such as rice, pasta, noodles and eggs etc.
• You can’t grab a cheeky snack from the cupboard unless you include the cost of buying the item new in your budget.
• You can use food sourced from your garden as long as you can account for the price of production. (That free rhubarb from John's mum is going to go down a treat).
• Don’t at any point deprive yourself of three meals a day.
• You cannot accept ‘donated’ food from family or friends, but monetary donations towards our fundraising goals are acceptable, and encouraged! 
• You are allowed to drink tap water – remember you should try to drink at least 6-8 glasses of water each day.
• My additional rule-Teasing will absolutely not be tolerated. That means no one outside of this challenge is allowed to invite us to the pub or waft food under our noses unless you are prepared to make a large donation to our charity as penance.

So between the 2nd-8th July we will be doing our bit for the fight against extreme poverty by living off just £1 a day for 7 days. We want to raise as much awareness as we can of the 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty around the world- Think about that figure - 1.4 BILLION - that's over 20 times the population of the UK - living every day in extreme poverty. 

You can help too. Simply by reading this blog and checking in with our progress you are becoming more aware. We will be posting information about the lives of those people living below the line for real, letting you know the ways that you can make a difference to those 1.4 billion people and sharing our own experiences of feeding ourselves for so much less than normal. 

Wish us luck, without coffee, tea or alcohol we're really going to need it! 

And don't forget to visit the 'Our Charity' and 'Donate' pages to find out how you can make a difference by parting with a small amount of your own shopping budget.