Our work
Community care
Food, clothing, household essentials and emergency support when a household cannot cover the basics.
When a household cannot cover the basics, everything else becomes harder. Bills go unpaid because food came first. Children go to school hungry and cannot concentrate. A small setback becomes a spiral.
Community care is our response to immediate, practical need — the help that stops a difficult month becoming a difficult year.
The challenge
Hardship rarely announces itself. It arrives through a reduced shift, a broken boiler, a bereavement, an illness — and it compounds quietly.
By the time someone asks for help, they have usually been going without for a while, and have often exhausted the goodwill of everyone around them.
What we do
We provide practical essentials quickly and without ceremony, and we try to understand what sits behind the immediate need so that we are not simply repeating the same help next month.
Where another organisation is better placed — a food bank, a debt adviser, a local authority team — we say so and help the person get there.
Food support
Groceries and food provision for households that cannot cover them.
Clothing
Everyday clothing, school uniform, and warm clothing in winter.
Hygiene supplies
Toiletries and sanitary products, which are routinely unaffordable and rarely donated.
Household essentials
Bedding, cookware and the basics that make a house liveable.
Winter support
Additional help through the coldest months, when heating and eating compete.
Emergency financial assistance
Targeted help where a small sum at the right moment prevents a much larger problem.
Community outreach
Reaching people who will not come and ask, because asking costs something.
Who this programme supports
- Households in financial hardship
- Families with children
- People facing a sudden loss of income
- Older people on fixed incomes
- People who are isolated from other support
What good looks like
These are what we are working towards, not achievements we are claiming. We will report against them once we have verified figures.
- Households have enough to eat.
- Children attend school fed, clothed and able to take part.
- A short-term crisis does not become long-term debt.
- People are connected to the longer-term support they are entitled to.
Where we work
Locations are not yet published
Our impact
We have not published figures for this programme yet
Current projects
No projects are published yet
Stories from this work
No stories are published yet
Ways to help
- Give — a regular gift lets us plan rather than react.
- Volunteer with collections, sorting and distribution.
- Donate goods in kind through your church, workplace or community group.
- Tell someone who needs this that it exists.
Our other programmes
- EducationSchool supplies, scholarships, literacy, digital inclusion, mentoring and vocational learning.
- Health and wellbeingHealth education, outreach, mental wellbeing, disability inclusion and help navigating services.
- Family supportSupport for children, widows and widowers, older people, single-parent families, carers and vulnerable households.
- Crisis reliefEmergency food, shelter support, disaster and displacement response, and help through recovery.
- Community developmentSkills, employment readiness, enterprise support, small grants and sustainable livelihoods.