Well my New Years Resolution of being more organised and top of my “to do” list is definitely starting to slip with a second monthly update a little later than planned
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The team have been grateful for a little rest bite in February after a busy December & January. But we haven’t sat on our laurels.
The month has seen 26 food parcels delivered, 76 people fed and 450kg of food distributed. Taking us past the 3 tonnes of food distributed in our 8 months of helping the community. A BIG thankyou to Trevor Williams for continuing to work hard to provide this service . We were over the moon to see that Trevor had been nominated by a grateful member of the community for the Mayor’s Civic Awards
– i think we may of seen a little tear of emotion in Trevor’s eye when he received his letter. He genuinely believed it was a scam! Fingers crossed
for the shortlisting next month.
We have been hard at work on exploring collaborative opportunities within Swale with both the Swale Borough Councils Cost of Living Partnership Meeting and the Swale Voluntary Alliance kick off meeting. The positivity from these events and enthusiasm to work as a collective to support the community has been one of the fuels that invigorates the team and Trustees.
Thankyou to Ian Townsend-Blazier at Seashells Children & Families Centre, Sheerness for giving up his time to show us round their services and explore some ideas and opportunities for enhancing the services we can provide and maximise the distribution of surplus food. The area is fortunate to have such a great range of services available to them and we definitely found it informative and took away some homework to get started on.
Whilst we don’t currently take clothes donations we do sometimes get the odd selection handed in. We normally pass on Women and children’s clothes to Kent & Medway Community Sharewear. This month we had a selection of school clothes which we dropped into the school uniform selection at Kemsley Community Centre as part of their weekly Wednesday drop in sessions. Another great team looking to support those in need of support.
So a great month of collaboration with new parties and continuation of established working relationships we have the following thankyou’s to share:
– Morrisons Community Sittingbourne / Charlotte for the continued foodbank support. The Generous donations from the Christmas Giving Tree 2023 have now supported the food bank for January, February and March.
– Aldi Sheerness for their food donations
– Karen Roberts, her team and customers at The Jenny Wren for raising some well needed funds over the Festive period to support our ongoing services.
– Becky Seager for her kind food donations, we are very grateful. Thankyou.
– to all those small businesses, individuals and families that we have thanked personally on our group page – thankyou for your caring support.