My name is Gemma Fish and I am the founder of the support group Walkden & Little Hulton Step into Action Group based in Salford which I set up to help my local community in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic. I teamed up with Henry Hill – a Neuro Rehab Nurse at Salford Royal - who had also started a similar group Coronavirus Support Group for Walkden and Salford West and together we have recruited over 45 volunteers who are now helping people in our community every day.

We have had such a big response to our leaflets with requests for support coming in daily from delivering a newspaper, collecting prescriptions, shopping, broken boilers, finding a home, collecting donations for foodbanks or simply just for a chat and reassurance. We have helped over 200 people who have been unable to get out of their houses.

We are also helping out on a business front with advice for the self-employed, the recently unemployed or furloughed staff and we have linked up with a number of accountants and business advisors who have given their services for free to enable people to receive what they are entitled to from the governments packages.

In addition, we have helped over 150 people find employment too with local supermarkets, work at home jobs or helping them set-up new enterprises and revenue streams such as adding delivery options for their existing business which was previously shop based.

Initially we started this page to raise funds to specifically help our local NHS facilities and having done that we have also been able to provide food parcels, utility top-ups, toiletries and much more for our local community. So we are now updating the page to include our WHOLE community, all monies raised by this page will be used direct at the heart of Walkden and Little Hulton.

In addition, we are looking at setting up a 'Community Cafe' working with local food banks as the calls for help with food are increasing over the last few days and so we want to make sure our community is able to get a hot home-cooked meal as well as food for their cupboards.

Thank you for reading and thank you for your support. x