“We hope our donation can help to make a real difference to someone’s Christmas”
For the third year running Haydon Wick Parish Council has donated £200 to the Swindon Food Collective instead of sending corporate Christmas Cards. The funds, Haydon Wick Councillors decided, were needed for a much greater cause.
Chairman of the Council, Councillor Vinay Manro said that “we’ll still be sending our festive greetings, but via email again this, so no one misses out. It seemed the most sensible thing to do again this year. We’ll divert the £200 funds we’ve previously spent on printing and posting corporate cards, to the local community instead. We hope our donation can help to make a real difference to someone’s Christmas”.
Swindon Food Collective is an independent food bank in Swindon. They currently feed nearly 10,000 people per year, one third of these are children. They have seen demand for their assistance increase across the borough, with one zone particularly being the Haydon Wick and surrounding SN25 area.
The Parish Council hopes their donation will go some way to helping with the preparation of food boxes for individuals, couples and families. Anyone in need can ask for a referral. Referrals can be obtained via children’s schools, health visitors and midwives, professional carer agencies, social workers, Nelson Trust, Salvation Army, Threshold, Turning Point, Probation, Citizens Advice or the SBC Emergency Fund or Livewell Hub. These can either be in the form of a text referral form the agency of choice or a paper voucher which can be taken to any of the eight distribution centres.
Swindon Foodbank Collective told us: “Our workload has increased significantly since 2020 from feeding 6,000 to now almost 11,000 people and we have expanded our services from 8 distribution centres to 12 over the past couple of years.
We are now giving out in excess of 122 tonnes of stock a year which provides IRO 98,000 meals.
However, the cost of living crisis has meant that people can’t be as generous as they used to be. Donations of food etc., are coming in at about 92 tonnes a year and so the charity has had to buy extra stock of non-perishable food, toiletries and household products to meet the increased demand. We are very grateful to Haydon Wick Parish Council for their continued support.”
To find out more about Swindon Food Collective visit www.swindonfoodcollective.org/.
