We’ve been working hard all year to support our beautiful HQ community that have been absolutely battered by the cost of living crisis: we’ve provided 1,839 hot meals at our weekly community lunch and distributed 2,165 food bags at the weekly food bank. We’ve given out 400 food vouchers and 16 mobile data cards, as well as getting £3,000 of toiletries into the community. We ‘ve also had 175 one-to-one appointments with people to help them do benefit checks and claim support.

The Challenge

Christmas is always an expensive time of year and puts added pressure on already stretched families. The problem is even more pronounced this year in the current cost of living crisis. Our young people don't receive the gifts and celebrations that many others do. For a lot of our older community members, Christmas is spent alone - our community meal is the only celebration they'll have.

The Solution

We are making sure that young people, families and the community feel cared for and don't go without over Christmas and into the new year. We will do this through a youth Christmas party, Christmas community meal, hampers to all, extra food at the foodbank to ensure no-one goes without, and food vouchers.

Aims

- Christmas hampers for all our young people, families and community members. Every year we try to provide hampers of food, games and gift items.

- A Hackney Quest Christmas party for all our young people age 8 and above

- Extra food to supplement our foodbank over the Christmas period. All our food at the foodbank is donated by the Felix Project. We give out 50 bags each week and often don't get much in the delivery. With extra funding we'll make sure people don't go hungry over Christmas.

- We'd like to buy food vouchers to help anyone in crisis at Christmas and into the new year

- No further funding is needed for our Christmas community meal thanks to sponsorship from our friends at Polen Capital