Helping families in need this Christmas
Dec 19, 2013By Deborah Heaney, Accounts/Wages Clerk
Christmas is usually a lovely time of year for those of us fortunate to have family and friends and a few pounds in our pockets to treat ourselves and our loved ones. However, for hundreds of families across the country, the expense of Christmas can prove to be so bad they may turn to loan sharks to get extra cash and even to pay for food or heating.
One of our clients under the Procure Plus Framework is Your Housing Group and when their housing team saw the extent of food poverty affecting some of its residents in the region they decided to do something about it. They launched the Your Manchester Challenge – a project aiming to prepare and deliver 1240 seasonal gift packs to residents across the Greater Manchester area. The pack will be suitable for up to four people and contain no fewer than eight items – four of which will be food related. We thought this was a fabulous idea and so put out the call to our staff and sub-contractors to ask for their help.
As usual our staff have been very generous and thanks to them and the support of sub-contractors like M&R Heating, we were delighted to be able to deliver over 250 selection boxes and other sweet treats to the Your Manchester Challenge HQ. We are really pleased to have been able to play our part in what we know will be a very successful campaign.
The Challenge did get me thinking and I did some research of my own to find out just how bad things were for some families. The statistics are quite shocking. According to figures from The Trussel Trust, a charity that works with local communities to combat poverty, 13 million people live below the poverty line in the UK and everyday people go hungry for reasons ranging from redundancy to receiving an unexpected bill on a low income. As a result, there has been a 170% rise in numbers turning to food banks in the last 12 months.
The British Red Cross is to start distributing food to hard-up families for the first time since the Second World War with volunteers from the charity going into supermarkets asking shoppers to donate tinned and dry food to be passed on to families facing food poverty. If you are shopping in a supermarket that is supporting this cause, and if you can afford to, please donate one item of food from your shop to this great cause.
You can find out more about the Your Manchester Challenge @Mcr_Challenge and “like” it on Facebook: Your Mcr Challenge.
Happy Christmas everyone!
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