So… What have we been up to?

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Earlier in the summer we found people were struggling queuing to get in supermarkets, So helping hands set up a temporary Fruit and Veg stall, it was a great success and people really enjoyed the fresh produce.

We did a community clean up day in the Greenwood-Grassmere estate. Our volunteers battled some awful weather and cleared 1.7 tons of rubbish from a piece of land, we cleared sofas, beds, bikes, childrens swings and slides and lots of alcohol bottles and cans.

After the success of the clean up day, we did another one but this time we got the community involved and we did a work bubble clean up in Orford Park, keeping to all social distancing rules. afterwards we had a team talk buy a community litter picker champion Paul, and we handed out reusable bottles and sports bags out to people, to encourage them to reuse instead of re buying products.

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At Christmas we had a very generous anonymous donation of Christmas Presents for 87 of the pensioners and families we support, this was definitely the highlight of the year, our volunteers loved going to hand these lovely gifts out and just making people smile again, there was lots of tears this day too, but they was tears of happiness.

Over the Christmas period we were also contacted by a care home who had lots of covid patience, they had no families and only the clothes they had on. So we did a Christmas Care home appeal and Pam set up a Just Giving page and we raised enough money to buy each resident a new pair of slippers and Pjs. Morrisons and Asda also stepped in again and gave us lots of toiletries too so each resident had lovely christmas gifts of toiletries, Slippers and Pjs.

2 of our Main Volunteers Stephen and Moggy with their good friend Mike Went to the care home and did an open air concert outside the care home, so all the residents could sit in the window and listen, it was truly magical, seeing how happy they were, some even got out of their chairs to dance.

2021 started with a bang! we thought things might start to become a little easier but no Storm Christoph arrived. Longford was 2ft under water our volunteers sprung into action and were on the scene from 3pm helping families to get to safety. Carol, Stephen, Carole and Dave worked long into the night helping people get out of their homes and remove animals to safety. by 10pm residents had lost power and no means of keeping warm, so again the quick thinking our vols set up a drinks station and handed out hot drinks, cuppa soups and snacks out to people who couldn’t leave their homes.

The next day our local primary school was way underwater and we all helped there to try and less the damaged caused by the storm, later that day we acquired a dingy from one of our supported MD Solutions,and Carol and Aide went out Supported by Pam and Ste, they sailed food and supplies on the dingy to those who couldn’t leave their properties.

Liz from Asda was on a Mission to help and gave us £650 worth of cleaning materials to help the residents to start cleaning their homes and she helped us to create a pop up cafe from the boots of our cars, each morning Carol and Keith would go to asda and collect enough items to make 200 packed lunches, the the team would bag them all up.

Car 1 Pam & Carol would go to Bewsey, Car 2Clair and Jayne would go to Westbrook, Car 3 Sarah & Gill would go to Longford and Car 4 Joan and Gill would go to Dallam, each car would be serving packed lunches, hot drinks, pot noodles and also handing out microwaveable meals for the nighttimes.

So as you can see we have had a very busy 11 months.

We have over 20 fabulous volunteers who selflessly give up their time each week to come and help, we have a team who organise the drivers routes and then pack up the hampers to suit each family. They make sure there is enough food to last at least 4 days per household, we base this on how many are in the family from single people to a family of 11.

Carol Kilgannon & Pamela Queeney, Club Chairman & Secretary